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 the slope, which, indeed, it seems never to reach; for before
the stream has accomplished half the descent it is broken into fine
spray, and flaunts loosely in the wind like a veil of the most delicate
lace, or, when the sunlight drifts through it, a wondrously wrought
Persian scarf. There it appears to hang, miraculously suspended in mid-
air, while in fact it descends in imperceptible vapors to the slope,