The excursionists by-and-by went away out of the clouds, gliding breathlessly down the rails.  When snow covers this track, descent is sometimes made on a toboggan, but it is such a dangerous venture that all except the operatives are now forbidden to try it.  The velocity attained of three and a half miles in three minutes may seem nothing to a locomotive engineer who is making up time; it might seem slow to a lover whose sweetheart was at the foot of the slide; to ordinary mortals a mile a minute is quite enough on such an incline.

Our party, who would have been much surprised if any one had called them an excursion, went away on foot down the carriage road to the Glen House.  A descent of a few rods took them into the world of light and sun, and they were soon beyond the little piles of stones which mark the spots where tourists have sunk down bewildered in the mist and died of exhaustion and cold.  These little mounds help to give Mount Washington its savage and implacable character.  It is not subdued by all the roads and rails and scientific forces.  For days it may lie basking and smiling in the sun, but at any hour it is liable to become inhospitable and pitiless, and for a good part of the year the summit is the area of elemental passion.

How delightful it was to saunter down the winding road into a region of peace and calm; to see from the safe highway the great giants in all their majesty; to come to vegetation, to the company of familiar trees, and the haunts of men!  As they reached the Glen House all the line of rugged mountain-peaks was violet in the reflected rays.  There were people on the porch who were looking at this spectacle.  Among them the eager eyes of King recognized Irene.

“Yes, there she is,” cried Mrs. Farquhar; “and there—­oh, what a treacherous North——­is Mr. Meigs also.”

It was true.  There was Mr. Meigs, apparently domiciled with the Benson family.  There might have been a scene, but fortunately the porch was full of loungers looking at the sunset, and other pedestrians in couples and groups were returning from afternoon strolls.  It might be the crisis of two lives, but to the spectator nothing more was seen than the everyday meeting of friends and acquaintances.  A couple say good-night at the door of a drawing-room.  Nothing has happened—­nothing except a look, nothing except the want of pressure of the hand.  The man lounges off to the smoking-room, cool and indifferent; the woman, in her chamber, falls into a passion of tears, and at the end of a wakeful night comes into a new world, hard and cold and uninteresting.  Or the reverse happens.  It is the girl who tosses the thing off with a smile, perhaps with a sigh, as the incident of a season, while the man, wounded and bitter, loses a degree of respect for woman, and pitches his life henceforth on a lower plane.