“I hope not, M. Obenreizer.”

“Please call me, in your country, Mr. I call myself so, for I love your country.  If I could be English!  But I am born.  And you?  Though descended from so fine a family, you have had the condescension to come into trade?  Stop though.  Wines?  Is it trade in England or profession?  Not fine art?”

“Mr. Obenreizer,” returned Vendale, somewhat out of countenance, “I was but a silly young fellow, just of age, when I first had the pleasure of travelling with you, and when you and I and Mademoiselle your niece—­who is well?”

“Thank you.  Who is well.”

“—­Shared some slight glacier dangers together.  If, with a boy’s vanity, I rather vaunted my family, I hope I did so as a kind of introduction of myself.  It was very weak, and in very bad taste; but perhaps you know our English proverb, ‘Live and Learn.’”

“You make too much of it,” returned the Swiss.  “And what the devil!  After all, yours was a fine family.”

George Vendale’s laugh betrayed a little vexation as he rejoined:  “Well!  I was strongly attached to my parents, and when we first travelled together, Mr. Obenreizer, I was in the first flush of coming into what my father and mother left me.  So I hope it may have been, after all, more youthful openness of speech and heart than boastfulness.”

“All openness of speech and heart!  No boastfulness!” cried Obenreizer.  “You tax yourself too heavily.  You tax yourself, my faith! as if you was your Government taxing you!  Besides, it commenced with me.  I remember, that evening in the boat upon the lake, floating among the reflections of the mountains and valleys, the crags and pine woods, which were my earliest remembrance, I drew a word-picture of my sordid childhood.  Of our poor hut, by the waterfall which my mother showed to travellers; of the cow-shed where I slept with the cow; of my idiot half-brother always sitting at the door, or limping down the Pass to beg; of my half-sister always spinning, and resting her enormous goitre on a great stone; of my being a famished naked little wretch of two or three years, when they were men and women with hard hands to beat me, I, the only child of my father’s second marriage—­if it even was a marriage.  What more natural than for you to compare notes with me, and say, ’We are as one by age; at that same time I sat upon my mother’s lap in my father’s carriage, rolling through the rich English streets, all luxury surrounding me, all squalid poverty kept far from me.  Such is my earliest remembrance as opposed to yours!’”

Mr. Obenreizer was a black-haired young man of a dark complexion, through whose swarthy skin no red glow ever shone.  When colour would have come into another cheek, a hardly discernible beat would come into his, as if the machinery for bringing up the ardent blood were there, but the machinery were dry.  He was robustly made, well proportioned, and had handsome features.  Many would have perceived that some surface change in him would have set them more at their ease with him, without being able to define what change.  If his lips could have been made much thicker, and his neck much thinner, they would have found their want supplied.