“You’re taking a high stand, Mr. John.”

“John is best also.”

“Well, then—­John!”

“I’m taking it for your good and my pleasure.”

“I wonder if Suzanne is ready with the breakfast!”

“You needn’t go to see.  You know it’s not, and you know, too, that Suzanne will call us when it is ready.  A wonderfully capable woman, that Suzanne.  She didn’t look upon me with favor at first, but I believe she is really beginning to like me, to view me perhaps with approval as a sort of candidate.”

“Look how the snow is coming down!”

“But that’s an old story.  Let’s go back to Suzanne.”

“Oh no.  She’s coming for us.”

It was true.  The incomparable Suzanne stood in the doorway and summoned them to breakfast.

CHAPTER XIII

THE DANGEROUS FLIGHT

It snowed all that day and all the next night.  The lateness of the season seemed to add to the violence of the storm, as if it would make one supreme effort on these heights before yielding to the coming spring.  Many of the pines were blown down, and the snow lay several feet deep everywhere.  Now and then they heard thunderous sounds from the gorges telling them that great slides were taking place, and it was absolutely certain now that no one from the valley below could reach the lodge for days.

The sight from the windows of the house, when the driving snow thinned enough to permit a view, was magnificent.  They saw far away peak on peak and ridge on ridge, clothed in white, and sometimes they beheld the valley filled with vast clouds of mists and vapors.  Once John thought he caught a glimpse of Zillenstein, a menacing gray shadow far below, but the clouds in an instant floated between and he was not sure.

Yet it was a period of enchantment in the life of John Scott.  Their very isolation on the mountain, with Suzanne there in the double role of servant and guardian, seemed to draw Julie and him more closely together.  The world had practically melted away beneath their feet.  The great war was gone for them.  He was only twenty-two, but his experience had made him mentally much older, and she, too, had gained in knowledge and command of herself by all through which she had passed.

She showed to John a spirit and courage which he had never seen surpassed in any woman, and mingled with it all was a lightness and wit that filled the whole house with sunshine, despite the great storm that raged continually without.  In the music-room was a piano, and she played upon it the beautiful French “little songs” that John loved.  There were books and magazines in plenty, and now he read to her and then she read to him.  Sometimes they sat in silence and through the thick glass of the windows watched the snow driving by.