ay or two afterwards a coach containing the company was really
crawling and staggering up the spurs of the menacing mountain range.
Between Ezza's cheery denial of the danger and Muscari's boisterous
defiance of it, the financial family were firm in their original
purpose; and Muscari made his mountain journey coincide with theirs. A
more surprising feature was the appearance at the coast-town station of
the little priest of the restaurant; he alleged merely that business
led him also to cross the mountains of the midland. But young Harrogate
could not but connect his presence with the mystical fears and warnings
of yesterday.

The coach was a kind of commodious wagonette, invented by the modernist
talent of the courier, who dominated the expedition with his scientific
activity and breezy wit. The theory of danger from thieves was banished
from thought and speech; though so far conceded in formal act that some
slight protection was employed. The courier and the young banker carried
loaded revolvers, and Muscari (with much boyish gratification) buckled
on a kind of cutlass under his black cloak.

He had planted his person at a flying leap next to the lovely
Englishwoman; on the other side of her sat the priest, whose name was
Brown and who was fortunately a silent individual; the courier and the
father and son were on the banc behind. Muscari was in towering spirits,
seriously believing in the peril, and his talk to Ethel might well have
made her think him a maniac. But there was something in the crazy and
gorgeous ascent, amid crags like peaks loaded with woods like orchards,
that dragged her spirit up alone with his into purple preposterous
heavens with wheeling suns. The white road climbed like a white cat;
it spanned sunless chasms like a tight-rope; it was flung round far-off
headlands like a lasso.

And yet, however high they went, the desert still blossomed like the
rose. The fields were burnished in sun and wind with the colour of
kingfisher and parrot and humming-bird, the hues of a hundred flowering
flowers. There are no lovelier meadows and woodlands than the English,
no nobler crests or chasms than those of Snowdon and Glencoe. But
Ethel Harrogate had never before seen the southern parks tilted on the
splintered northern peaks; the gorge of Glencoe laden with the fruits
of Kent. There was nothing here of that chill and desolation that in
Britain one associates with high and wild scenery. It was rather like