Count Abel hereupon gave his hand to M. Moriaz to aid him in preserving his equilibrium as he crossed the plank, which was not wide.  Throughout the descent he overwhelmed him with attentions, sustaining him with his arm when the descent became too abrupt.  So soon as they had made their way to a foot-path, they resumed their conversation.  Abel was very clear-sighted, and, like Socrates, as we said before, he was master in the art of interrogating.  He turned the conversation to erratic glaciers and boulders.  M. Moriaz was enchanted with his manner of asking questions; as Professor of the College of France, he was well pleased to owe his life to an intelligent man.

As they traversed a pine-forest, they heard a voice hailing them, and they were shortly joined by a guide whom Mlle. Moriaz, mortally disquieted at the prolonged absence of her father, had sent in quest of him.  Pale with emotion, trembling in every fibre, she had seated herself on the bank of a stream.  She was completely a prey to terror, and in her imagination plainly saw her father lying half dead at the bottom of some precipice or rocky crevasse.  On perceiving him she uttered a cry of joy and ran to meet him.

“Ah! truly, my love,” said he, “I have been more fortunate than wise.  And I shall have to ask my deliverer his name in order to present him to you.”

Count Abel appeared not to have heard these last words.  He stammered out something about M. Moriaz having exaggerated the worth of the little service it had been his good fortune to render him, and then with a cold, formal, dignified air, he bowed to Antoinette and moved hurriedly away, as a man who cares little to make new acquaintances, and who longs to get back to his solitude.

He was already at some distance when M. Moriaz, who had been busily recounting his adventures to his daughter, bethought him that he had kept his deliverer’s overcoat.  He searched in the pockets, and there found a memorandum-book and some visiting-cards bearing the name of Count Abel Larinski.  Before dinner he made the tour of all the hotels in Saint Moritz without discovering where M. Larinski lodged.  He learned it in the evening from a peasant who came over from Cellarina for the overcoat.

The good Mlle. Moiseney was quite taken with Count Abel; first, because he was handsome, and then because he played the piano bewitchingly.  There could be no doubt that Antoinette would feel grateful to this good-looking musician who had restored to her her father.  Certain of being no longer thwarted in her enthusiasm, she said to her that evening, with a smile which was meant to be excessively ironical: 

“Well, my dear, do you still think that Count Larinski has a stoop in his shoulders, and that his head is badly poised?”

“It is a matter of small import, but I do not gainsay it.”

“Ah, if you had only heard him play one of Schumann’s romances!”