anonymously very long.  His departure over night leaked out.  I was asked if it was true.  The flight of Mrs. Lascelles was the next discovery; desperate deductions were drawn at once.  She had jilted the unlucky youth and sent him in utter recklessness on his intentionally suicidal ascent.  Nobody any longer expected to see him come down alive; so much I gathered from the fragments of conversation that reached my ears; and never was better occupation for a bad day than appeared to be afforded by the discussion of the supposititious tragedy in all its imaginary details.  As, however, the talk invariably abated at my approach, giving place to uncomplimentary glances in my direction, I could not but infer that public opinion had assigned me an unenviable part in the piece.  Perhaps I deserved it, though not from their point of view.

The afternoon was at once a dreariness and a dread.  There was no ray of sun without, no sort of warmth within.  The Matterhorn never reappeared, but seemed the grimmer monster for this sinister invisibility.  I gathered that there was real occasion for anxiety, if not for alarm, and I nursed mine chiefly in my own room until I heard the news when I went down for my letters.  Bob Evers had walked in as though nothing had happened, and gone straight up to his room with a note that the concierge handed him.  Some one had asked him whether it was he who had been up the Matterhorn in the morning, and young Evers had vouchsafed the barest affirmative compatible with civility.  The sunburnt climber was my informant.

“And I don’t mind telling you it is a relief to me,” he added, “and to everybody, though I shouldn’t wonder if there was a little unconscious disappointment in the air as well.  I congratulate you, for I could see you were anxious, and I must find an opportunity of congratulating your young friend himself.”

Meanwhile no such opportunity was afforded me, though I quite expected and was fully prepared for another visit from Bob in my room.  I waited for him there until dinner-time, but he never came, and I was beginning to wish he would.  It was like the wrapping of the Matterhorn in mist; it only widened the field of apprehension; and yet it was not for me to go to the boy.  My unrest was further aggravated by a letter which I had just received from the boy’s mother in answer to my first to her.  It was not a very dreadful letter; but I only trusted that no evil impulse had caused Catherine to write in anything like the same strain to Bob; for neither was it a very charitable letter, nor one that a man could be glad to get from the woman whom he had set out on an enduring pinnacle.  There was only this to be said for it, that years ago I had sought in vain for a really human weakness in Catherine Evers, and now at last I had found one.  She was rather too human about Mrs. Lascelles.