A quarter of an hour later Lynde was on the way to Geneva.  Life and the world had somehow darkened for him within the hour.  It seemed to him incredible that that was the same road over which he had passed so joyously two days before.  The swollen torrents now rushed vengefully through the arches of the stone bridges; the low-hanging opaque clouds pressed the vitality out of the atmosphere; in the melancholy gray light the rain-soaked mountains wore a human aspect of dolor.  He was not sorry when the mist gathered like frost on the carriage windows and shut the landscape from his sight.

The storm had been terrible in Geneva and in the neighborhood.  It was a scene of devastation all along the road approaching the town.  Most of the trees in the suburbs had been completely stripped of foliage by the hailstones; the leaves which still clung to the bent twigs were slit as if volleys of buckshot had been fired into them.  But the saddest thing to see was field after field of rich grain mown within a few inches of the ground by those swift, keen sickles which no man’s hand had held.  In the section of the city through which Lynde passed to the railroad the streets were literally strewn with broken tiles and chimney-pots.  In some places the brown and purple fragments lay ankle-deep, like leaves in autumn.  Hundreds of houses had been unroofed and thousands of acres laid waste in a single night.  It will take the poor of the canton fifty years to forget the summer storm of 1875.

By noon the next day Lynde was in Paris.  As he stepped from the station and stood under the blue sky in the sparkling Parisian atmosphere, the gloom and desolation he had left behind at Geneva and Chamouni affected him like the remembrance of a nightmare.  For a brief space he forgot his sorrowful errand; then it came back to him with its heaviness redoubled by the contrast.  He threw his valise on the seat of a fiacre standing near the crossway, and drove to the office of Galignani in the Rue de Rivoli—­the morgue in which the names of all foreign travellers are daily laid out for recognition.  The third name Lynde fell upon was that of William Denham, Hotel Meurice.  The young man motioned to the driver to follow him and halt at the hotel entrance, which was only a few steps further in the arcade facing the gardens of the Tuileries.

Mr. Denham was at breakfast in the small salon opening on the paved square formed by the four interior walls of the building; he had just seated himself at the table, which was laid for two persons, when the waiter brought him Mrs. Denham’s note and Lynde’s card.  Mr. Denham glanced from one to the other, and then broke the seal of the envelope with a puzzled air which directly changed into a perturbed expression.

“Show the gentleman in here,” he said, speaking over the top of the note-sheet to the servant, “and set another cover.”

It was a strongly featured person of fifty or fifty-five, slightly bald, and closely shaven with the exception of a heavy iron-gray mustache, who rose from the chair and stepped forward to meet Lynde as he entered.  Lynde’s name was familiar to Mr. Denham, it having figured rather prominently in his wife’s correspondence during the latter part of the sojourn at Geneva.