starting, Gaeta
explained, making large eyes which blamed her friends for everything;
and the driver had brought his horses slowly, oh, so slowly, up the
long hill, the stupid fellow. But now the carriage flashed ahead, and
I was left to tramp on alone, while the Contessa and the Boy flirted,
and Joseph and Innocentina bickered, all alike unmindful of me.

We lunched at the Col de Forclaz, where the hill, tired of going up,
ran down to another valley. There was a godlike assemblage of
mountains, white and blue, mountains as far as the eye could reach,
and I had a thought or two which I would have liked to exchange for
some of the Boy's. But if he had ever really had any thoughts, save
for the fun of the moment, he had the air of forgetting them all for
Gaeta. When, in a tone of unenthusiastic politeness, she asked if I
would not take my friend's place in the carriage for a while when we
started on again, out of pure spite against the little wretch who had
dropped me for her I said that I would.

I could not see the Boy's face, to make sure if he were disappointed,
but I hoped it. As for myself, I would fain have walked. In a scene of
such exalted beauty, Gaeta's little quips and quirks struck a wrong
note. Sitting with my back to the horses, I could see the Boy walking
on behind, his face raised mountain-ward and sky-ward, and I longed to
know of what he was thinking, for evidently he had left his
aggravating, "awfully-jolly-don't-you-know" mood in the carriage with
the Contessa.

[Illustration: "SITTING WITH MY BACK TO THE HORSES."]

The Baron and his wife disputed volubly about the date of one of
Paolo's grand dinners in Paris; Gaeta yawned, and I was stricken with
dumbness. I could think of nothing to say which she would think worth
hearing. Soon, the tremendously steep descent into the valley gave me
the best of excuses to jump down and relieve the horses, which the
coachman was leading. Somehow, I don't quite know how, I fell back a
good distance behind the carriage, and then I found myself so near the
Boy, who had been slowly following, that it would have been rude not
to join him. After all, we had no quarrel, yet oddly enough we could
not take up the thread of our intercourse exactly where it had been
broken off. There seemed to be a knot or a tangle in it, which would
have to be smoothed out.

It was a wholly irrelevant incident which untied the knot, and left us
as we had been, though there was no reaso