“And that you will send me tidings shortly, and that these tidings will be good.  I shall await them here, at the Hotel Steinbock.”

“As you please; but, for the love of Heaven, let me sleep!”

M. Camille Langis pressed his two arms and said, with much emotion:  “I place myself in your hands; take care how you answer for my life!”

“O youth!” murmured M. Moriaz, actually thrusting Camille from the room.  “One might search in vain for a more beautiful invention.”

Ten hours later, a post-chaise bore in the direction of Engadine Mlle. Antoinette Moriaz, her father, her demoiselle de compagnie, and her femme de chambre.  They breakfasted tolerably well in a village situated in the lower portion of a notch, called Tiefenkasten, which means, literally, deep chest, and certainly a deeper never has been seen.  After breakfast they pursued their way farther, and towards four o’clock in the afternoon they reached the entrance of the savage defile of Bergunerstein, which deserves to be compared with that of Via Mala.  The road lies between a wall of rocks and a precipice of nearly two hundred metres, at the bottom of which rush the swift waters of the Albula.  This wild scenery deeply moved Mlle. Moriaz; she never had seen anything like it at Cormeilles or anywhere about Paris.  She alighted, and, moving towards the parapet, leaned over it, contemplating at her ease the depths below, which the foaming torrent beneath filled with its roars.

Her father speedily joined her.

“Do you not find this music charming?” she asked of him.

“Charming, I grant,” he replied; “but more charming still are those brave workmen who, at the risk of their necks, have engineered such a suspended highway as we see here.  I think you admire the torrent too much, and the road not enough.”  And after a pause he added, “I wish that our friend Camille Langis had had fewer dangers to contend with in constructing his.”  Antoinette turned quickly and looked at her father; then she bestowed her attention once more upon the Albula.  “To be sure,” resumed M. Moriaz, stroking his whiskers with the head of his cane, “Camille is just the man to make his way through difficulties.  He has a youthful air that is very deceptive, but he always has been astonishingly precocious.  At twenty years of age he became head of his class at the Central School; but the best thing about him is that, although in possession of a fortune, yet he has a passion for work.  The rich man who works accepts voluntary poverty.”

There arose from the precipice a damp, chill breeze; Mlle. Moriaz drew over her head a red hood that she held in her hand, and scraping off with her finger some of the facing of the parapet, which glittered with scales of mica, she asked:  “What do you call this?”

“It is gneiss, a sort of sheet-granite; but do not you too admire people who work when they are not compelled to do anything?”