“Oh, no,” returned the girl, “this is luncheon.  I’ll cook your dinner.  You’ll see.”

There was a pause.  Geoffrey looked at McVay.  The moment for disillusioning her had manifestly come.  Wherever they might next meet it would not be at his dinner table.  A hateful vision of a criminal court rose before him.

“Miss McVay,” he said gravely, indifferent to the signals of warning which the other man was directing toward him; “we shall not be here at dinner.  Your brother will tell you my reasons for wishing to start down the mountain.”

“Now?”

“At once.”

She coloured slowly and deeply,—­the only evidence of anger.  “I do not need any other reason than your wish that we should go,” she said, rising.  “I should thank you for having borne with us so long.”

“Upon my word, Holland, it is madness to start as late as this,” said McVay.  “It will be dark in an hour.”

She turned on her brother quickly:  “Please say no more about the matter, Billy,” she said.  “We will start at once.”

“You won’t start if it means certainly freezing to death,” he remonstrated.

She flashed a glance at Geoffrey, who had also risen and was trying to compel the truth from McVay by a stern, steady glance.

“I would,” she answered and shut the door behind her.

McVay sprang up and was about to follow her when Geoffrey stopped him.  “One moment,” he said, “you are quite right.  It is too late to start to-night.  We must stay here until to-morrow.  But if we are to spend a night here without your sister’s being told—­”

“My dear Holland, think of her position, if we did tell her!”

“I grant that the information had better be withheld until just as we are starting, but in that case I must—­”

“I know what you are going to ask,—­my word of honour not to escape.  I give it, I give it willingly.”

“I’m not going to ask for anything at all,” said Geoffrey.  “I’m going to tell you one or two things, and I advise you to pay attention.  We won’t have any nonsense at all.  Remember I am armed, and I am a quick man with a gun.  There may be some quicker, but not in the East, and it wasn’t in the East I got my training.  You will always keep in front of me where I can see you plainly, and you will never, under any circumstances come nearer than six feet to me.  If you should ever come nearer than that or take a sudden step in my direction, I’d shoot you just as sure as I stand here.”

McVay looked distinctly crestfallen.  “Oh, come, Holland,” he said, “isn’t that the least little bit exaggerated?  You would not shoot me before my own sister?”

“I would not like to, but there are things I should dislike even more, and having you escape is one of them.”

The other thought it over.  “The trouble is,” he explained, “that I am impulsive.  You must have noticed it.  I get carried away.  You know how I am.  I’m not at all sure that I shall remember.”