Her voice had dropped.  I bent my ear.

“If only,” she sighed, “I had a friend who would!”

Catherine was still looking down when I looked up; but the droop of the slender body, the humble angle of the cavalier hat, the faint flush underneath, all formed together a challenge and an appeal which were the more irresistible for their sweet shamefacedness.  Acute consciousness of the past (I thought), and (I even fancied) some penitence for a wrong by no means past undoing, were in every sensitive inch of her, as she sat a suppliant to the old player of that part.  And there are emotions of which the body may be yet more eloquent than the face; there was the figure of Watts’s “Hope” drooping over as she drooped, not more lissom and speaking than her own; just then it caught my eye, and on the spot it was as though the lute’s last string of that sweet masterpiece had vibrated aloud in Catherine’s room.

My hand shook as I reached for my trusty sticks, but I cannot say that my voice betrayed me when I inquired the name of the Swiss hotel.

“The Riffel Alp,” said Catherine—­“above Zermatt, you know.”

“I start to-morrow morning,” I rejoined, “if that will do.”

Then Catherine looked up.  I cannot describe her look.  Transfiguration were the idle word, but the inadequate, and yet more than one would scatter the effect of so sudden a burst of human sunlight.

“Would you really go?” she cried.  “Do you mean it, Duncan?”

“I only wish,” I replied, “that it were to Australia.”

“But then you would be weeks too late.”

“Ah, that’s another story!  I may be too late as it is.”

Her brightness clouded on the instant; only a gleam of annoyance pierced the cloud.

“Too late for what, may I ask?”

“Everything except stopping the banns.”

“Please don’t talk nonsense, Duncan.  Banns at nineteen!”

“It is nonsense, I agree; at the same time the minor consequences will be the hardest to deal with.  If they are being talked about, well, they are being talked about.  You know Bob best:  suppose he is making a fool of himself, is he the sort of fellow to stop because one tells him so?  I should say not, from what I know of him, and of you.”

“I don’t know,” argued Catherine, looking pleased with her compliment.  “You used to have quite an influence over him, if you remember.”

“That’s quite possible; but then he was a small boy, now he is a grown man.”

“But you are a much older one.”

“Too old to trust to that.”

“And you have been wounded in the war.”

“The hotel may be full of wounded officers; if not I might get a little unworthy purchase there.  In any case I’ll go.  I should have to go somewhere before many days.  It may as well be to that place as to another.  I have heard that the air is glorious; and I’ll keep an eye on Robin, if I can’t do anything else.”