Capes spoke casually of their plans for work.  “It’s a flabby, loose-willed world we have to face.  It won’t even know whether to be scandalized at us or forgiving.  It will hold aloof, a little undecided whether to pelt or not—­”

“That depends whether we carry ourselves as though we expected pelting,” said Ann Veronica.

“We won’t.”

“No fear!”

“Then, as we succeed, it will begin to sidle back to us.  It will do its best to overlook things—­”

“If we let it, poor dear.”

“That’s if we succeed.  If we fail,” said Capes, “then—­”

“We aren’t going to fail,” said Ann Veronica.

Life seemed a very brave and glorious enterprise to Ann Veronica that day.  She was quivering with the sense of Capes at her side and glowing with heroic love; it seemed to her that if they put their hands jointly against the Alps and pushed they would be able to push them aside.  She lay and nibbled at a sprig of dwarf rhododendron.

“Fail!” she said.

Part 5

Presently it occurred to Ann Veronica to ask about the journey he had planned.  He had his sections of the Siegfried map folded in his pocket, and he squatted up with his legs crossed like an Indian idol while she lay prone beside him and followed every movement of his indicatory finger.

“Here,” he said, “is this Blau See, and here we rest until to-morrow.  I think we rest here until to-morrow?”

There was a brief silence.

“It is a very pleasant place,” said Ann Veronica, biting a rhododendron stalk through, and with that faint shadow of a smile returning to her lips....

“And then?” said Ann Veronica.

“Then we go on to this place, the Oeschinensee.  It’s a lake among precipices, and there is a little inn where we can stay, and sit and eat our dinner at a pleasant table that looks upon the lake.  For some days we shall be very idle there among the trees and rocks.  There are boats on the lake and shady depths and wildernesses of pine-wood.  After a day or so, perhaps, we will go on one or two little excursions and see how good your head is—­a mild scramble or so; and then up to a hut on a pass just here, and out upon the Blumlis-alp glacier that spreads out so and so.”

She roused herself from some dream at the word.  “Glaciers?” she said.

“Under the Wilde Frau—­which was named after you.”

He bent and kissed her hair and paused, and then forced his attention back to the map.  “One day,” he resumed, “we will start off early and come down into Kandersteg and up these zigzags and here and here, and so past this Daubensee to a tiny inn—­it won’t be busy yet, though; we may get it all to ourselves—­on the brim of the steepest zigzag you can imagine, thousands of feet of zigzag; and you will sit and eat lunch with me and look out across the Rhone Valley and over blue distances beyond