I gave an easy good-morning to the group, taking off my hat to Madame.  The Count cried disdainfully that I was a slug-a-bed.  Henry asked with obvious sarcasm if I had not been up the Piz Langrev.  The Countess held out her hand in an uncertain way.  Certainly I must have been very young, for all this gave me intense pleasure.  Especially did my heart leap when I took the Countess to the window a little to the right, and, pointing with one hand upwards, put the Count’s binocular into her hands.  The sun of the mid-noon was shining on a black speck floating from the topmost cliff of the Piz Langrev.  As she looked she flung out her hand to me, still continuing to gaze with the glass held in the other.  She saw her own scarlet favour flying from the pine-branch.  That cry of wonder and delight was better to me than the Victoria Cross.  I was young then.  It is so good to be young, and better to be in love.

CHAPTER X

THE PURPLE CHALET

Our life at the Kursaal Promontonio was full of change and adventure.  For adventures are to the adventurous.  In the morning we read quietly together, Henry and I, beginning as soon as the sun touched our balcony, and continuing three or four hours, with only such intermission as the boiling of our spirit-lamp and the making of cups of tea afforded to the steady work of the morning.

Then at breakfast-time the work of the day was over.  We were ready to make the most of the long hours of sunshine which remained.  Sometimes we rowed with Lucia and her brother on the lake, dreaming under the headlands and letting the boat drift among the pictured images of the mountains.

Oftener the Count and Henry would go to their shooting, or away on some of the long walks which they took in company.

One evening it happened that M. Bourget, the architect of the hotel, a bright young Belgian, was at dinner with us, and the conversation turned upon the illiberal policy of the new Belgian Government.  Most of the guests at table were landowners and extreme reactionaries.  The conversation took that insufferably brutal tone of repression at all hazards which is the first thought of the governing classes of a despotic country, when alarmed by the spread of liberal opinions.

I could see that both the Count and Lucia put a strong restraint upon themselves, for I knew that their sympathies were with the oppressed of their own nation.  But the excitement of M. Bourget was painful to see.  He could speak but little English (for out of compliment to us the Count and the others were speaking English); and though on several occasions he attempted to tell the company that matters in his country were not as they were being represented, he had not sufficient words to express his meaning, and so subsided into a dogged silence.

My own acquaintance with the political movements in Europe was not sufficient to enable me to claim any special knowledge; but I knew the facts of the Belgian dispute well enough, and I made a point of putting them clearly before the company.  As I did so, I saw the Count lean towards me, his face whiter than usual and his eyes dark and intense.  The Countess, too, listened very intently; but the architect could not keep his seat.