He glanced at them, placed them in their category, and looked away, utterly uninterested.  They belonged to the great class of the continental wanderers, people of whom little is known and everything suspected—­people with no kinsfolk, who flit from hotel to hotel and gather about them for a season the knowing middle-aged men and the ignorant young ones, and perhaps here and there an unwary woman deceived by the more than fashionable cut of their clothes.  The mother he put down as nearer forty than thirty, and engaged in a struggle against odds to look nearer twenty than thirty.  The daughter’s face Chayne could not see, for it was bent persistently over a book.  But he thought of a big doll in a Christmas toy-shop.  From her delicate bronze shoes to her large hat of mauve tulle everything that she wore was unsuitable.  The frock with its elaborations of lace and ribbons might have passed on the deal boards of Trouville.  Here at Annemasse her superfineness condemned her.

Chayne would have thought no more of her, but as he passed her table on his way out of the buffet his eyes happened to fall on the book which so engrossed her.  There was a diagram upon the page with which he was familiar.  She was reading an old volume of the “Alpine Journal.”  Chayne was puzzled—­there was so marked a contradiction between her outward appearance and her intense absorption in such a subject as Alpine adventure.  He turned at the door and looked back.  Sylvia Thesiger had raised her head and was looking straight at him.  Thus their eyes met, and did more than meet.

Chayne, surprised as he had been by the book which she was reading, was almost startled by the gentle and rather wistful beauty of the face which she now showed to him.  He had been prepared at the best for a fresh edition of the mother’s worn and feverish prettiness.  What he saw was distinct in quality.  It seemed to him that an actual sympathy and friendliness looked out from her dark and quiet eyes, as though by instinct she understood with what an eager exultation he set out upon his holiday.  Sylvia, indeed, living as she did within herself, was inclined to hero-worship naturally; and Chayne was of the type to which, to some extent through contrast with the run of her acquaintance, she gave a high place in her thoughts.  A spare, tall man, clear-eyed and clean of feature, with a sufficient depth of shoulder and wonderfully light of foot, he had claimed her eyes the moment that he entered the buffet.  Covertly she had watched him, and covertly she had sympathized with the keen enjoyment which his brown face betrayed.  She had no doubts in her mind as to the intention of his holiday; and as their eyes met now involuntarily, a smile began to hesitate upon her lips.  Then she became aware of the buffet, and her ignorance of the man at whom she looked, and, with a sudden mortification, of her own over-elaborate appearance.  Her face flushed, and she lowered it again somewhat quickly to the pages of her book.  But it was as though for a second they had spoken.