“She wouldn’t understand in a thousand years.”

“Then you’d better not marry her.  You know, Stewart, I have an idea that women imagine a good many pretty rotten things about us, anyhow.  A sensible girl would rather know the truth and be done with it.  What a man has done with his life before a girl—­the right girl—­comes into it isn’t a personal injury to her, since she wasn’t a part of his life then.  You know what I mean.  But she has a right to know it before she chooses.”

“How many would choose under those circumstances?” he jibed.

Peter smiled.  “Quite a few,” he said cheerfully.  “It’s a wrong system, of course; but we can get a little truth out of it.”

“You can’t get away with it” stuck in Stewart’s mind for several days.  It was the one thing Peter said that did stick.  And before Stewart had recovered enough to be up and about he had made up his mind to tell Anita.  In his mind he made quite a case for himself; he argued the affair against his conscience and came out victorious.

Anita’s party had broken up.  The winter sports did not compare, they complained, with St. Moritz.  They disliked German cooking.  Into the bargain the weather was not good; the night’s snows turned soft by midday; and the crowds that began to throng the hotels were solid citizens, not the fashionables of the Riviera.  Anita’s arm forbade her traveling.  In the reassembling of the party she went to the Kurhaus in the valley below the pension with one of the women who wished to take the baths.

It was to the Kurhaus, then, that Stewart made his first excursion after the accident.  He went to dinner.  Part of the chaperon’s treatment called for an early retiring hour, which was highly as he had wished it and rather unnerving after all.  A man may decide that a dose of poison is the remedy for all his troubles, but he does not approach his hour with any hilarity.  Stewart was a stupid dinner guest, ate very little, and looked haggard beyond belief when the hour came for the older woman to leave.

He did not lack courage however.  It was his great asset, physical and mental rather than moral, but courage nevertheless.  The evening was quiet, and they elected to sit on the balcony outside Anita’s sitting room, the girl swathed in white furs and leaning back in her steamer chair.

Below lay the terrace of the Kurhaus, edged with evergreen trees.  Beyond and far below that was the mountain village, a few scattered houses along a frozen stream.  The townspeople retired early; light after light was extinguished, until only one in the priest’s house remained.  A train crept out of one tunnel and into another, like a glowing worm crawling from burrow to burrow.

The girl felt a change in Stewart.  During the weeks he had known her there had been a curious restraint in his manner to her.  There were times when an avowal seemed to tremble on his lips, when his eyes looked into hers with the look no women ever mistakes; the next moment he would glance away, his face would harden.  They were miles apart.  And perhaps the situation had piqued the girl.  Certainly it had lost nothing for her by its unusualness.