“Then they’re all right for the present,” said the mountaineer.  “It’s the getting down that’s ticklish.”

“You can see the rope blowing about between them ... what a wind there must be ... it’s bent out taut like a bow, you can see it against the snow, and they’re bending themselves more than forty-five degrees to meet it.”

“All very well going up,” murmured the mountaineer:  there was a sinister innuendo in the curt comments of the practical man.

I turned into the hall.  It, however, was quite deserted.  I had hoped I might see something of Mrs. Lascelles; she was not one of those in the glass veranda.  I now looked in the drawing-room, but neither was she there.  Returning to the empty hall, I passed a minute peering through the locked glass door of the pigeon-holes in which the careful concierge files the unclaimed letters.  There was nothing for me that I could discern, in the C pigeon-hole; but next door but one, under E, there lay on the very top a letter which caught my eye and more.  It had not been through any post.  It was a note directed to R. Evers, Esq., in a hand that I knew instinctively to be that of Mrs. Lascelles, though I had never seen it in my life before.  It was a good hand, but large and bold and downright as herself.

The concierge stood in the doorway, one eye on the disappearing Matterhorn, one on the experts and others in animated conclave round the still inaccessible telescope.  I touched the concierge on the arm.

“Did you see Mrs. Lascelles this morning?”

The man’s eyes opened before his lips.

“She has gone away, sir.”

“I know,” I said, having indeed divined no less.  “What train did she catch?”

“The first one from here.  That also catches the early train from Zermatt.”

“I am sorry,” I said after a pause.  “I hoped to see Mrs. Lascelles before she went; now I must write.  She left you an address, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes, sir.”

“I shall ask you for it later on.  No letters for me, I suppose?”

“No, sir.”

“Sure?”

“I will look again.”

And I looked with him, over his shoulder; but there was nothing; and the note for Bob Evers now inspired me with a tripartite blend of curiosity, envy, and apprehension.  I would have had a last word from the same hand myself; had it been never so scornful, this silent scorn was the harder sort to bear.  Also I wanted much to know what her last word was to Bob—­and dreaded more what it might be.

There remained the unexpected triumph of having got rid of my lady after all.  That is not to be belittled even now.  It is a triumph to succeed in any undertaking, more especially when one has abandoned one’s own last hope of such success.  The unpleasant character of this particular emprise made its eventual accomplishment in some ways the greater matter for congratulation in my eyes.  At least I had done