ld have rejected anything
she held out to him; but he remarked grumly to Philip, as he took it,--

"It is easy to see where you got your principles!"

"Less easy than you think," Philip answered. "I got them from no living
man or woman, though I grant you, Lois showed me the way to them. I got
them from the Bible, old friend."

Tom glared at the speaker.

"Have you given up your cigars too?"

Mr. Dillwyn laughed out, and Lois said somewhat exultantly,

"Yes, Mr. Caruthers."

"I am sure I wish you would too!" said Tom's wife deploringly to her
husband. "I think if anything's horrid, it's the after smell of
tobacco."

"But the _first_ taste of it is all the comfort a fellow gets in this
world," said Tom.

"No fellow ought to say that," his friend returned.

"The Bible!" Tom repeated, as if it were a hard pill to swallow.
"Philip Dillwyn quoting _that_ old authority!"

"Perhaps I ought to go a little further, and say, Tom, that my quoting
it is not a matter of form. I have taken service in the Christian army,
since I saw you the last time. Now tell me how you and Mrs. Caruthers
come to be at the top of this pass in a snow-storm on the sixteenth of
June?"

"Fate!" said Tom.

"We did not expect to have a snow-storm, Mr. Dillwyn," Mrs. Caruthers
added.

"But you might," said Philip. "There have been snow-storms everywhere
in Switzerland this year."

"Well," said Tom, "we did not come for pleasure, anyhow. Never should
dream of it, until a month later. But Mrs. Caruthers got word that a
special friend of hers would be at Zermatt by a certain day, and begged
to meet her; and stay was uncertain; and so we took what was said to be
the shortest way from where the letter found us. And here we are."

"How is the coffee, Mr. Caruthers?" Lois asked pleasantly. Tom looked
into the depths of his coffee cup, as if it were an abstraction, and
then answered, that it was the best coffee he had ever had in
Switzerland; and upon that he turned determinately to Mr. Dillwyn and
began to talk of other things, unconnected with Switzerland or the
present time. Lois was fain to entertain Tom's wife. The two women had
little in common; nevertheless Mrs. Caruthers gradually warmed under
the influence that shone upon her; thawed out, and began even to enjoy
herself. Tom saw it all, without once turning his face that way; and he
was fool enough to fancy that he was the only one. But Philip saw it
too, as it were without looking; a