It was only when the likeness flashed upon Lynde suddenly, as it had done in the grove the previous day, that it now had the power to startle him.  At the present moment it did not even seriously annoy him.  In an idle, pensive way he noted the coincidence of the man leading the mule.  The man was Morton and the mule was Mary!  Lynde smiled to himself at the reflection that Mary would probably not accept the analogy with very good grace if she knew about it.  This carried him to Rivermouth; then he thought of Cinderella’s slipper, packed away in the old hair-trunk in the closet, and how perfectly the slipper would fit one of those feet which a floating fold of the waterproof that instant revealed to him—­ and he was in Switzerland again.

“Miss Ruth,” he said, looking up quickly and urging his mule as closely behind hers as was practicable, “what are your plans to be when your uncle comes?”

“When my uncle comes we shall have no plans—­aunt Gertrude and I. Uncle Denham always plans for everybody.”

“I don’t imagine he will plan for me,” said Lynde gloomily.  “I wish he would, for I shall not know what to do with myself.”

“I thought you were going to St. Petersburg.”

“I have given that up.”

“It’s to be Northern Germany, then?”

“No, I have dropped that idea, too.  Will Mr. Denham remain here any time?”

“Probably not long.”

“What is to become of me after you are gone!” exclaimed Lynde.  “When I think of Mr. Denham sweeping down on Chamouni to carry you off, I am tempted to drive this mule straight over the brink of one of these precipices!”

The girl leaned forward, looking at the rocky wall of the Flegere through an opening in the pines, and made no reply.

“Miss Ruth,” said Lynde, “I must speak!”

“Do not speak,” she said, turning upon him with a half-imperious, half-appealing gesture, “I forbid you;” and then, more gently, “We have four or five days, perhaps a week, to be together; we are true, frank friends.  Let us be just that to the end.”

“Those are mercifully cruel words,” returned the young man, with a dull pain at his heart.  “It is a sweet way of saying a bitter thing.”

“It is a way of saying that your friendship is very dear to me, Mr. Lynde,” she replied, sitting erect in the saddle, with the brightness and the blackness deepening in her eyes.  “I wonder if I can make you understand how I prize it.  My life has not been quite like that of other girls, partly because I have lived much abroad, and partly because I have been very delicate ever since my childhood; I had a serious lung trouble then, which has never left me.  You would not think it, to look at me.  Perhaps it is the anxiety I have given aunt Gertrude which has made her so tenacious of my affection that I have scarcely been permitted to form even those intimacies which girls form among themselves.  I have never known any one—­any gentleman—­as intimately as I have known you.  She has let me have you for my friend.”