Lynde was standing on the inn steps with his after-dinner cheroot, meditatively blowing circles of smoke into the air, when the carriage drove round from the stable and the Denhams appeared in the doorway.  The young woman gave Lynde an ungloved hand as he assisted her to the seat.  The slight pressure of her fingers and the touch of her rings were possessions which he retained until long after the carriage had passed that narrow defile near the stalactite cavern in the Balme, where a couple of tiresome fellows insist on letting off a small cannon for you, to awaken a very disobliging old Echo who refuses to repeat anything more than twice.  What a magic there is in hands—­in some hands!  Lynde could have held Mrs. Denham’s hand a fortnight without getting anything so tangible as that fleeting touch of Miss Ruth’s.

“Is the grotto worth seeing?” Mrs. Denham asked, with a speculative glance up the mountain side.

“It is an hour’s hard climb, and scarcely pays,” replied Lynde, appalled by this indication of Alpine enterprise.  “I visited it the first time I came over the road.  You get a good look at the peaks of Mont Douron on the other side of the valley, and that’s all; the grotto itself is not remarkable.  But I think it will be worth while to halt a moment when we come to the fall of Nant d’Arpenaz.  That is really marvellous.  It is said to be nearly as fine as the Staubbach.”

As Miss Ruth leaned back in the cushions, lazily fastening the third button of her glove with a hair-pin, there was just the faintest glimmer of humor in the eyes that looked up into the young man’s face.  He was being read, and he knew it; his dark intentions in regard to that waterfall were probably as legible to her as if they had been printed in great-primer type on his forehead.  On two or three occasions at Geneva she had wrested his unworded thought from him with the same effortless sorcery.  Lynde evaded her look, and studied a spire-like peak on his left.  “I shall have an air of detected villainy now, when I ask her,” he mused.  “That’s the first shade of coquetry I ever saw in her.  If she accepts my invitation without the aunt, she means either to flirt with me or give me the chance to speak to her seriously.  Which is it to be, Miss Ruth?  I wonder if she is afraid of Mrs. Denham.  Sometimes it seems to me she would be a different girl if it were not for the presence of the aunt.”

By and by, at a bend of the road after passing Magland, the waterfall became visible in the distance.  The cascade of Nant d’Arpenaz is one of the highest falls in Savoy, and if it is not the most beautiful, one can still well afford, having seen that, not to see the others.  It is not a large volume of water, except when swollen by rains, as it happened to be this day, but its plunge from the dizzy brown cliff is the gracefulest thing in the world.  The curiously stratified face of the precipice is concave, and the water has a fall of several hundred feet to reach