In the stables Denry saw the Countess’s hired sleigh and horse, and in the sleigh her glowing red cloak.  And he had one of his ideas, which he executed, although snow was beginning to fall.  In ten minutes he and Nellie were driving forth, and Nellie in the red cloak held the reins.  Denry, in a coachman’s furs, sat behind.  They whirled past the Hotel Metropole.  And shortly afterwards, on the wild road towards Attalens, Denry saw a pair of skis scudding as quickly as skis can scud in their rear.  It was astonishing how the sleigh, with all the merry jingle of its bells, kept that pair of skis at a distance of about a hundred yards.  It seemed to invite the skis to overtake it, and then to regret the invitation and flee further.  Up the hills it would crawl, for the skis climbed slowly.  Down them it galloped, for the skis slid on the slopes at a dizzy pace.  Occasionally a shout came from the skis.  And the snow fell thicker and thicker.  So for four or five miles.  Starlight commenced.  Then the road made a huge descending curve round a hollowed meadow, and the horse galloped its best.  But the skis, making a straight line down the snow, acquired the speed of an express, and gained on the sleigh one yard in every three.  At the bottom, where the curve met the straight line, was a farmhouse and outbuildings and a hedge and a stone wall and other matters.  The sleigh arrived at the point first, but only by a trifle.  “Mind your toes,” Denry muttered to himself, meaning an injunction to the skis, whose toes were three feet long.  The skis, through the eddying snow, yelled frantically to the sleigh to give room.  The skis shot up into the road, and in swerving aside swerved into a snow-laden hedge, and clean over it into the farmyard, where they stuck themselves up in the air, as skis will when the person to whose feet they are attached is lying prone.  The door of the farm opened and a woman appeared.

She saw the skis at her doorstep.  She heard the sleigh-bells, but the sleigh had already vanished into the dusk.

“Well, that was a bit of a lark, that was, Countess!” said Denry to Nellie.  “That will be something to talk about.  We’d better drive home through Corsier, and quick too!  It’ll be quite dark soon.”

“Supposing he’s dead!” Nellie breathed, aghast, reining in the horse.

“Not he!” said Denry.  “I saw him beginning to sit up.”

“But how will he get home?”

“It looks a very nice farmhouse,” said Denry.  “I should think he’d be sorry to leave it.”

VI

When Denry entered the dining-room of the Beau-Site, which had been cleared for the ball, his costume drew attention not so much by its splendour or ingenuity as by its peculiarity.  He wore a short Chinese-shaped jacket, which his wife had made out of blue linen, and a flat Chinese hat to match, which they had constructed together on a basis of cardboard.  But his thighs were enclosed in a pair of absurdly ample riding-breeches of an impressive check and cut to a comic exaggeration of the English pattern.  He had bought the cloth for these at the tailor’s in Montreux.  Below them were very tight leggings, also English.  In reply to a question as to what or whom he supposed himself to represent, he replied: