“Were you alone at the inn, you and he?”

“Yes.”

“Did he know your father?”

Sylvia stared at her mother.

“I don’t know.  I suppose not.  How should he?”

“It’s not impossible,” replied Mrs. Thesiger.  Then she leaned on the table.  “It was he who put these ideas into your head about going away, about leaving me.”  She made an accusation rather than put a question, and made it angrily.

“No, mother,” Sylvia replied.  “He never spoke of you.  The ideas have been growing in my mind for a long time, and to-day—­” She raised her head, and turning slightly, looked up to where just behind her the ice-peaks of the Aiguilles du Midi and de Blaitiere soared into the moonlit sky.  “To-day the end came.  I became certain that I must go away.  I am very sorry, mother.”

“The message of the mountains!” said her mother with a sneer, and Sylvia answered quietly: 

“Yes.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Thesiger.  She had been deeply stung by her daughter’s words, by her wish to go, and if she delayed her consent, it was chiefly through a hankering to punish Sylvia.  But the thought came to her that she would punish Sylvia more completely if she let her go.  She smiled cruelly as she looked at the girl’s pure and gentle face.  And, after all, she herself would be free—­free from Sylvia’s unconscious rivalry, free from the competition of her freshness and her youth, free from the grave criticism of her eyes.

“Very well, you shall go to your father.  But remember!  You have made your choice.  You mustn’t come whining back to me, because I won’t have you,” she said, brutally.  “You shall go to-morrow.”

She took the letter from its envelope but she did not show it to her daughter.

“I don’t use your father’s name,” she said.  “I have not used it since”—­and again the cruel smile appeared upon her lips—­“since he left me, as you say.  He is called Garratt Skinner, and he lives in a little house in Hobart Place.  Yes, you shall start for your home to-morrow.”

Sylvia stood up.

“Thank you,” she said.  She looked wistfully at her mother, asking her pardon with the look.  But she did not approach her.  She stood sadly in front of her.  Mrs. Thesiger made no advance.

“Well?” she asked, in her hard, cold voice.

“Thank you, mother,” Sylvia repeated, and she walked slowly to the door of the hotel.  She looked up to the mountains.  Needle spires of rock, glistening pinnacles of ice, they stood dreaming to the moonlight and the stars.  The great step had been taken.  She prayed for something of their calm, something of their proud indifference to storm and sunshine, solitude and company.  She went up to her room and began to pack her trunks.  And as she packed, the tears gathered in her eyes and fell.