He crossed to the window and blew carelessly some ashes of burned paper
from the sill, and stood watching them as they floated away lazily over
the tops of the trees.


* * * * *




_The Glamour of the Snow_

I


Hibbert, always conscious of two worlds, was in this mountain village
conscious of three. It lay on the slopes of the Valais Alps, and he had
taken a room in the little post office, where he could be at peace to
write his book, yet at the same time enjoy the winter sports and find
companionship in the hotels when he wanted it.

The three worlds that met and mingled here seemed to his imaginative
temperament very obvious, though it is doubtful if another mind less
intuitively equipped would have seen them so well-defined. There was
the world of tourist English, civilised, quasi-educated, to which he
belonged by birth, at any rate; there was the world of peasants to which
he felt himself drawn by sympathy--for he loved and admired their
toiling, simple life; and there was this other--which he could only call
the world of Nature. To this last, however, in virtue of a vehement
poetic imagination, and a tumultuous pagan instinct fed by his very