“Bosh!  I can skate for an hour without sitting down,” said Jane.  However, she helped Agatha to a chair and left her.  Then Smilash, as if desiring a rest also, sat down close by on the margin of the pond.

“Well,” he said, without troubling himself as to whether their conversation attracted attention or not, “what do you think of me now?”

“Why did you not tell me before, Mr. Trefusis?”

“That is the cream of the joke,” he replied, poising his heels on the ice so that his skates stood vertically at legs’ length from him, and looking at them with a cynical air.  “I thought you were in love with me, and that the truth would be too severe a blow to you.  Ha! ha!  And, for the same reason, you generously forbore to tell me that you were no more in love with me than with the man in the moon.  Each played a farce, and palmed it off on the other as a tragedy.”

“There are some things so unmanly, so unkind, and so cruel,” said Agatha, “that I cannot understand any gentleman saying them to a girl.  Please do not speak to me again.  Miss Ward!  Come to me for a moment.  I—­I am not well.”

Ward hurried to her side.  Smilash, after staring at her for a moment in astonishment, and in some concern, skimmed away into the crowd.  When he reached the opposite bank he took off his skates and asked Jane, who strayed intentionally in his direction, to tell Miss Wylie that he was gone, and would skate no more there.  Without adding a word of explanation he left her and made for his dwelling.  As he went down into the hollow where the road passed through the plantation on the college side of the chalet he descried a boy, in the uniform of the post office, sliding along the frozen ditch.  A presentiment of evil tidings came upon him like a darkening of the sky.  He quickened his pace.

“Anything for me?” he said.

The boy, who knew him, fumbled in a letter case and produced a buff envelope.  It contained a telegram.

From Jansenius, London.

To J. Smilash, Chamoounix Villa, Lyvern.

Henrietta dangerously ill after journey wants to see you doctors say must come at once.

There was a pause.  Then he folded the paper methodically and put it in his pocket, as if quite done with it.

“And so,” he said, “perhaps the tragedy is to follow the farce after all.”

He looked at the boy, who retreated, not liking his expression.

“Did you slide all the way from Lyvern?”

“Only to come quicker,” said the messenger, faltering.  “I came as quick as I could.”

“You carried news heavy enough to break the thickest ice ever frozen.  I have a mind to throw you over the top of that tree instead of giving you this half-crown.”

“You let me alone,” whimpered the boy, retreating another pace.

“Get back to Lyvern as fast as you can run or slide, and tell Mr. Marsh to send me the fastest trap he has, to drive me to the railway station.  Here is your half-crown.  Off with you; and if I do not find the trap ready when I want it, woe betide you.”