’Besides I’ve a slack purse, and shun guides and inns when I can.  I care for open air, colour, flowers, weeds, birds, insects, mountains.  There’s a world behind the mask.  I call this life; and the town’s a boiling pot, intolerably stuffy.  My one ambition is to be out of it.  I thank heaven I have not another on earth.  Yes, I care for my note-book, because it’s of no use to a human being except me.  I slept beside a spring last night, and I never shall like a bedroom so well.  I think I have discovered the great secret:  I may be wrong, of course.’  And if so, he had his philosophy, the admission was meant to say.

Carinthia expected the revelation of a notable secret, but none came; or if it did it eluded her grasp:—­he was praising contemplation, he was praising tobacco.  He talked of the charm of poverty upon a settled income of a very small sum of money, the fruit of a compact he would execute with the town to agree to his perpetual exclusion from it, and to retain his identity, and not be the composite which every townsman was.  He talked of Buddha.  He said:  ’Here the brook’s the brook, the mountain’s the mountain:  they are as they always were.’

‘You’d have men be the same,’ Chillon remarked as to a nursling prattler, and he rejoined:  ’They’ve lost more than they’ve gained; though, he admitted, ‘there has been some gain, in a certain way.’

Fortunately for them, young men have not the habit of reflecting upon the indigestion of ideas they receive from members of their community, sometimes upon exchange.  They compare a view of life with their own view, to condemn it summarily; and he was a curious object to Chillon as the perfect opposite of himself.

‘I would advise you,’ Chillon said, ’to get a pair of Styrian boots, if you intend to stay in the Alps.  Those boots of yours are London make.’

’They ‘re my father’s make,’ said Mr. Woodseer.

Chillon drew out his watch.  ‘Come, Carinthia, we must be off.’  He proposed his guide, and, as Anton was rejected, he pointed the route over the head of the valley, stated the distance to an inn that way, saluted and strode.

Mr. Woodseer, partly rising, presumed, in raising his hat and thanking Carinthia, to touch her fingers.  She smiled on him, frankly extending her open hand, and pointing the route again, counselling him to rest at the inn, even saying:  ‘You have not yet your strength to come on with us?’

He thought he would stay some time longer:  he had a disposition to smoke.

She tripped away to her brother and was watched through the whiffs of a pipe far up the valley, guiltless of any consciousness of producing an impression.  But her mind was with the stranger sufficiently to cause her to say to Chillon, at the close of a dispute between him and Anton on the interesting subject of the growth of the horns of chamois:  ’Have we been quite kind to that gentleman?’

Chillon looked over his shoulder.  ’He’s there still; he’s fond of solitude.  And, Carin, my dear, don’t give your hand when you are meeting or parting with people it’s not done.’