‘But see this in winter, as I did with father, Chillon!’ said Carinthia.

She said it upon love’s instinct to halo the scene with something beyond present vision, and to sanctify it for her brother, so that this walk of theirs together should never be forgotten.

A smooth fold of cloud, moveless along one of the upper pastures, and still dense enough to be luminous in sunlight, was the last of the mist.

They watched it lying in the form of a fish, leviathan diminished, as they descended their path; and the head was lost, the tail spread peacockwise, and evaporated slowly in that likeness; and soft to a breath of air as gossamer down, the body became a ball, a cock, a little lizard, nothingness.

The bluest bright day of the year was shining.  Chillon led the descent.  With his trim and handsome figure before her, Carinthia remembered the current saying, that he should have been the girl and she the boy.  That was because he resembled their mother in face.  But the build of his limbs and shoulders was not feminine.

To her admiring eyes, he had a look superior to simple strength and grace; the look of a great sky-bird about to mount, a fountain-like energy of stature, delightful to her contemplation.  And he had the mouth women put faith in for decision and fixedness.  She did, most fully; and reflecting how entirely she did so, the thought assailed her:  some one must be loving him!

She allowed it to surprise her, not choosing to revert to an uneasy sensation of the morning.

That some one, her process of reasoning informed her, was necessarily an English young lady.  She reserved her questions till they should cease this hopping and heeling down the zigzag of the slippery path-track.  When children they had been collectors of beetles and butterflies, and the flying by of a ‘royal-mantle,’ the purple butterfly grandly fringed, could still remind Carinthia of the event it was of old to spy and chase one.  Chillon himself was not above the sentiment of their “very early days”; he stopped to ask if she had been that lustrous blue-wing, a rarer species, prized by youngsters, shoot through the chestnut trees:  and they both paused for a moment, gazing into the fairyland of infancy, she seeing with her brother’s eyes, this prince of the realm having escaped her.  He owned he might have been mistaken, as the brilliant fellow flew swift and high between leaves, like an ordinary fritillary.  Not the less did they get their glimpse of the wonders in the sunny eternity of a child’s afternoon.

‘An Auerhahn, Chillon!’ she said, picturing the maturer day when she had scaled perilous heights with him at night to stalk the blackcock in the prime of the morning.  She wished they could have had another such adventure to stamp the old home on his heart freshly, to the exclusion of beautiful English faces.

On the level of the valley, where they met the torrent-river, walking side by side with him, she ventured an inquiry:  ’English girls are fair girls, are they not?’