stolen over him the two or three times when she had sunk back in the
carriage cushions and let her eyes dwell upon him contemplatively for a
moment. He was beginning to hate Mrs. Denham, and he thoroughly loathed
Bonneville, where a polyglot crowd of tourists came flocking into the
small waiting-room just as Miss Ruth was putting up her hair and
unconsciously framing for Lynde a never-to-be-forgotten picture in the
little cracked inn-mirror.

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.