Passengers by diligence usually dine at Bonneville, a fact which Lynde had ascertained when he selected Cluses, nine miles beyond, as the resting-place for his own party.  They were soon on the road again, with the black horses turned into roan, traversing the level meadow lands between the Brezon and the Mole.  With each mile, now, the landscape took on new beauty and wildness.  The superb mountains—­some with cloudy white turrets, some thrusting out huge snow-powdered prongs, and others tapering to steely dagger-points—­hemmed them in on every side.

Here they came more frequently on those sorrowful roadside cairns, surmounted by a wooden cross with an obliterated inscription and a shrivelled wreath, marking the spot where some peasant or mountaineer had been crushed by a land-slide or smothered in the merciless winter drift.  As the carriage approached Cluses, the road crept along the lips of precipices and was literally overhung by the dizzy walls of the Brezon.  Crossing the Arve—­you are always crossing the Arve or some mad torrent on your way from Geneva to Chamouni—­the travellers entered the town of Cluses and alighted at one of those small Swiss hotels which continually astonish by their tidiness and excellence.

In spite of the intermittent breeze wandering down from the regions above the snow-line, the latter part of the ride had been intensely hot.  The cool, shadowy room, with its table ready laid for dinner near the latticed window, was a welcome change to the three dusty voyagers as they were ushered into it by the German landlord, whose round head thinly thatched with whitey-brown hair gave him the appearance of having been left out over night in a hoar frost.  It was a refreshment in itself to look at him, so crisp and cool, with that blinding afternoon glare lying on the heated mountain-slopes.

“I could be contented here a month,” said Mrs. Denham, throwing off her bonnet, and seating herself in the embrasure of the window.

“The marquis allows us only three quarters of an hour,” Lynde observed.  “He says we cannot afford to lose much time if we want to reach Chamouni before sundown.”

“Chamouni will wait for us.”

“But the sunset won’t.”

Lynde had a better reason than that for wishing to press on.  It was between there and Magland, or, rather, just beyond Magland, that he proposed to invite Miss Denham to walk.  The wonderful cascade of Arpenaz, though it could be seen as well from the carriage, was to serve as pretext.  Of course he would be obliged to include Mrs. Denham in his invitation, and he had sufficient faith in the inconsistency of woman not to rely too confidently on her declining.  “As she never walks, she’ll come along fast enough,” was Lynde’s grim reflection.

He had by no means resolved on what he should say to Miss Ruth, if he got her alone.  In the ten minutes’ walk, which would be almost equivalent to a first interview, he could not say much.  He could tell her how grieved he was at the thought of the approaching separation, and tell her in such a manner as would leave her in no great doubt as to the state of his feelings.  But whether he went so far as that was a problem which he intended to let chance solve for him.