The old village of St Anton had one long, narrow street which bent at right angles to a bridge which spanned the river flowing from the lake.  Thence the road climbed steeply, but at the other end of the street it ran on the level by the water’s edge, lined with gimcrack boarding-houses, now shuttered to the world, and a few villas in patches of garden.  At the far end, just before it plunged into a pine-wood, a promontory jutted into the lake, leaving a broad space between the road and the water.  Here were the grounds of a more considerable dwelling—­snow-covered laurels and rhododendrons with one or two bigger trees—­and just on the water-edge stood the house itself, called the Pink Chalet.

I wheeled Peter past the entrance on the crackling snow of the highway.  Seen through the gaps of the trees the front looked new, but the back part seemed to be of some age, for I could see high walls, broken by few windows, hanging over the water.  The place was no more a chalet than a donjon, but I suppose the name was given in honour of a wooden gallery above the front door.  The whole thing was washed in an ugly pink.  There were outhouses—­garage or stables among the trees—­and at the entrance there were fairly recent tracks of an automobile.

On our way back we had some very bad beer in a cafe and made friends with the woman who kept it.  Peter had to tell her his story, and I trotted out my aunt in Zurich, and in the end we heard her grievances.  She was a true Swiss, angry at all the belligerents who had spoiled her livelihood, hating Germany most but also fearing her most.  Coffee, tea, fuel, bread, even milk and cheese were hard to get and cost a ransom.  It would take the land years to recover, and there would be no more tourists, for there was little money left in the world.  I dropped a question about the Pink Chalet, and was told that it belonged to one Schweigler, a professor of Berne, an old man who came sometimes for a few days in the summer.  It was often let, but not now.  Asked if it was occupied, she remarked that some friends of the Schweiglers—­rich people from Basle—­had been there for the winter.  ’They come and go in great cars,’ she said bitterly, ’and they bring their food from the cities.  They spend no money in this poor place.’

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Presently Peter and I fell into a routine of life, as if we had always kept house together.  In the morning he went abroad in his chair, in the afternoon I would hobble about on my own errands.  We sank into the background and took its colour, and a less conspicuous pair never faced the eye of suspicion.  Once a week a young Swiss officer, whose business it was to look after British wounded, paid us a hurried visit.  I used to get letters from my aunt in Zurich, Sometimes with the postmark of Arosa, and now and then these letters would contain curiously worded advice or instructions from him whom my aunt called ‘the kind patron’.  Generally I was told to be patient.  Sometimes I had word about the health of ‘my little cousin across the mountains’.  Once I was bidden expect a friend of the patron’s, the wise doctor of whom he had often spoken, but though after that I shadowed the Pink Chalet for two days no doctor appeared.