Was she one at all?  How could I tell?  Yes, it was Lascelles, the other name in the case, to the best of my recollection.  But had she any right to bear it?  And even supposing they had married, what had happened to the second husband?  Widow or no widow, second marriage or no second marriage, defensible or indefensible, was this the right friend for a lad still fresh from Eton, the only son of his mother, who had sent me in secret to his side?

There was only one answer to the last question, whatever might be said or urged in reply to all the rest.  I could not but feel that Catherine Evers had been justified in her instinct to an almost miraculous degree; that her worst fears were true enough, so far as the lady was concerned; and that Providence alone could have inspired her to call in an agent who knew what I knew, and who therefore saw his duty as plainly as I already saw mine.  But it is one thing to recognise a painful duty and quite another thing to know how to minimise the pain to those most affected by its performance.  The problem was no easy one to my mind, and I lay awake upon it far into the night.

Tired out with travel, I fell asleep in the end, to awake with a start in broad daylight.  The sun was pouring through the uncurtained dormer-window of my room under the roof.  And in the sunlight, looking his best in knickerbockers, as only thin men do, with face greased against wind and glare, and blue spectacles in rest upon an Alpine wideawake, stood the lad who had taken his share in keeping me awake.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he began.  “It’s horrid cheek, but when I saw your room full of light I thought you might have been even earlier than I was.  You must get them to give you curtains up here.”

He had a note in his hand and I thought by his manner there was something that he wished and yet hesitated to tell me.  I accordingly asked him what it was.

“It’s what we were speaking about last night!” burst out Bob.  “That’s why I’ve come to you.  It’s these silly fools who can’t mind their own business and think everybody else is like themselves!  Here’s a note from Mrs. Lascelles which makes it plain that that old idiot George is not the only one who has been talking about us, and some of the talk has reached her ears.  She doesn’t say so in so many words, but I can see it’s that.  She wants to get out of our expedition to Monte Rosa hut—­wants me to go alone.  The question is, ought I to let her get out of it?  Does it matter one rap what this rabble says about us?  I’ve come to ask your advice—­you were such a brick about it all last night—­and what you say I’ll do.”

I had begun to smile at Bob’s notion of “a rabble”:  this one happened to include a few quite eminent men, as you have seen, to say nothing of the average quality of the crowd, of which I had been able to form some opinion of my own.  But I had already noticed in Bob the exclusiveness of the type to which he belonged, and had welcomed it as one does welcome the little faults of the well-night faultless.  It was his last sentence that made me feel too great a hypocrite to go on smiling.