A fit of heavy-mindedness ensued, that heightened the contrast her recent mood had bequeathed, between herself, ignorant as she was, and those ladies.  Their names, Livia and Henrietta, soared above her and sang the music of the splendid spheres.  Henrietta was closer to earth, for her features had been revealed; she was therefore the dearer, and the richer for him who loved her, being one of us, though an over-earthly one; and Carinthia gave her to Chillon, reserving for herself a handmaiden’s place within the circle of their happiness.

This done, she sat straight in the car.  It was toiling up the steep ascent of a glen to the mountain village, the last of her native province.  Her proposal to walk was accepted, and the speeding of her blood, now that she had mastered a new element in it, soon restored her to her sisterly affinity with natural glories.  The sunset was on yonder side of the snows.  Here there was a feast of variously-tinted sunset shadows on snow, meadows, rock, river, serrated cliff.  The peaked cap of the rushing rock-dotted sweeps of upward snow caught a scarlet illumination:  one flank of the white in heaven was violetted wonderfully.

At nightfall, under a clear black sky, alive with wakeful fires round head and breast of the great Alp, Chillon and Carinthia strolled out of the village, and he told her some of his hopes.  They referred to inventions of destructive weapons, which were primarily to place his country out of all danger from a world in arms; and also, it might be mentioned, to bring him fortune.  ‘For I must have money!’ he said, sighing it out like a deliberate oath.  He and his uncle were associated in the inventions.  They had an improved rocket that would force military chiefs to change their tactics:  they had a new powder, a rifle, a model musket—­the latter based on his own plans; and a scheme for fortress artillery likely to turn the preponderance in favour of the defensive once again.  ‘And that will be really doing good,’ said Chillon, ’for where it’s with the offensive, there’s everlasting bullying and plundering.’

Carinthia warmly agreed with him, but begged him be sure his uncle divided the profits equally.  She discerned what his need of money signified.

Tenderness urged her to say:  ‘Henrietta!  Chillon.’

‘Well?’ he answered quickly.

‘Will she wait?’

‘Can she, you should ask.’

‘Is she brave?’

‘Who can tell, till she has been tried?’

‘Is she quite free?’

‘She has not yet been captured.’

‘Brother, is there no one else . . . ?’

‘There’s a nobleman anxious to bestow his titles on her.’

‘He is rich?’

‘The first or second wealthiest in Great Britain, they say.’

‘Is he young?’

‘About the same age as mine.’

‘Is he a handsome young man?’

‘Handsomer than your brother, my girl.’