Sailing that lake in the cool morning, what a contrast to the champagne houpla nights of Paris!  And how docile was my pupil!  He suffered me to lead him through the Castle of Chillon like a new-born lamb, and even would not play the little horses in the Kursaal at Geneva, although, perhaps, that was because the stakes were not high enough to interest him.  He was nearly always silent, and, from the moment of our departure from Paris, had fallen into dreamfulness, such as would come over myself at the thought of the beautiful lady.  It touched my heart to find how he was ready with acquiescence to the slightest suggestion of mine, and, if it had been the season, I am almost credulous that I could have conducted him to Baireuth to hear Parsifal!

There were times when his mood of gentle sorrow was so like mine that I wondered if he, too, knew a grey pongee skirt.  I wondered over this so much, and so marvellingly, also, because of the change in him, that at last I asked him.

We had gone to Lucerne; it was clear moonlight, and we smoked on our little balcony at the Schweitzerhof, puffing our small clouds in the enormous face of the strangest panorama of the world, that august disturbation of the earth by gods in battle, left to be a land of tragic fables since before Pilate was there, and remaining the same after William Tell was not.  I sat looking up at the mountains, and he leaned on the rail, looking down at the lake.  Somewhere a woman was singing from Pagliacci, and I slowly arrived at a consciousness that I had sighed aloud once or twice, not so much sadly, as of longing to see that lady, and that my companion had permitted similar sounds to escape him, but more mournfully.  It was then that I asked him, in earnestness, yet with the manner of making a joke, if he did not think often of some one in North America.

“Do you believe that could be, and I making the disturbance I did in Paris?” he returned.

“Yes,” I told him, “if you are trying to forget her.”

“I should think it might look more as if I were trying to forget that I wasn’t good enough for her and that she knew it!”

He spoke in a voice which he would have made full of ease —­ “off-hand,” as they say; but he failed to do so.

“That was the case?” I pressed him, you see, but smilingly.

“Looks a good deal like it,” he replied, smoking much at once.

“So?  But that is good for you, my friend!”

“Probably.”  He paused, smoking still more, and then said, “It’s a benefit I could get on just as well without.”

“She is in North America?”

“No; over here.”

“Ah!  Then we will go where she is.  That will be even better for you!  Where is she?”

“I don’t know.  She asked me not to follow her.  Somebody else is doing that.”

The young man’s voice was steady, and his face, as usual, showed no emotion, but I should have been an Italian for nothing had I not understood quickly.  So I waited for a little while, then spoke of old Pilatus out there in the sky, and we went to bed very late, for it was out last night in Lucerne.