“I must be going,” he said, over loudly, and Garratt Skinner smiled.

“I’m afraid she won’t hear that,” he said softly, measuring with his eyes the distance between the group and the house.  “But come again, Captain Chayne, and sit it out.”

Chayne flushed with anger.  He said, “Thank you,” and tried to say it jauntily and failed.  He took his leave and walked across the lawn to the garden, trying to assume a carriage of indifference and dignity.  But every moment he expected to hear the two whom he had left laughing at his discomfiture.  Neither, however, did laugh.  Walter Hine was, indeed, indignant.

“Why did you ask him to come again?” he asked, angrily, as the garden door closed upon Chayne.

Garratt Skinner laid his hand on Walter Hine’s arm.

“Don’t you worry, Wallie,” he said, confidentially.  “Every time Chayne comes here he loses ten marks.  Give him rope!  He does not, after all, know a great deal of geography.”

CHAPTER XV

KENYON’S JOHN LATTERY

Chayne returned to London on the following day, restless and troubled.  Jealousy, he knew, was the natural lot of the lover.  But that he should have to be jealous of a Walter Hine—­there was the sting.  He asked the old question over and over again, the old futile question which the unrewarded suitor puts to himself with amazement and a despair at the ridiculous eccentricities of human nature.  “What in the world can she see in the fellow?” However, he did not lose heart.  It was not in his nature to let go once he had clearly set his desires upon a particular goal.  Sooner or later, people and things would adjust themselves to their proper proportions in Sylvia’s eyes.  Meanwhile there was something to be done—­a doubt to be set at rest, perhaps a discovery to be made.

His conversation with Garratt Skinner, the subject which Garratt Skinner had chosen, and the knowledge with which he had spoken, had seemed to Chayne rather curious.  A man might sit by his fireside and follow with interest, nay almost with the passion of the mountaineer, the history of Alpine exploration and adventure.  That had happened before now.  And very likely Chayne would have troubled himself no more about Garratt Skinner’s introduction of the theme but for one or two circumstances which the more he reflected upon them became the more significant.  For instance:  Garratt Skinner had spoken and had asked questions about the new ascents made, the new passes crossed within the last twenty years, just as a man would ask who had obtained his knowledge out of books.  But of the earlier ascents he had spoken differently, though the difference was subtle and hard to define.  He seemed to be upon more familiar ground.  He left in Chayne’s mind a definite suspicion that he was speaking no longer out of books, but from an intimate personal knowledge, the knowledge of actual experience.  The suspicion had grown up gradually, but it had strengthened almost into a conviction.