The grandeur and the freshness, the free, elemental play of stream and sky and mountain, seized upon a man in whom the main impulses of life were already weary, and filled him with an involuntary physical delight.  He noticed the flowers at his feet, in the drenched grass which was already lifting up its battered stalks, and along the margins of the streams—­deep blue colombines, white lilies, and yellow anemones.  Incomparable beauty lived and breathed in each foot of pasture; and when he raised his eyes from the grass they fed on visionary splendors of snow and rock, stretching into the heavens.

No life visible—­except a line of homing cattle, led by a little girl with tucked-up skirt and bare feet.  And—­in the distance—­the slender figure of a woman walking—­stopping often to gather a flower—­or to rest?  Not a woman of the valley, clearly.  No doubt a traveller, weather-bound like himself at the inn.  He watched the figure a little, for some vague grace of movement that seemed to enter into and make a part of that high beauty in which the scene was steeped; but it disappeared behind a fold of pasture, and he did not see it again.

In spite of the multitude of vehicles gathered about the inn there were not so many guests in the salle-a-manger, when Ashe entered it, as he had expected.  He supposed that a majority of these vehicles must be return carriages from Brieg.  Still there was much clatter of talk and plates, and German seemed to be the prevailing tongue.  Except for a couple whom Ashe took to be a Genevese professor and his wife, there was no lady in the room.

He lingered somewhat late at table, toying with his orange, and reading a Journal de Geneve, captured from a neighbor, which contained an excellent “London letter.”  The room emptied.  The two Swiss handmaidens came in to clear away soiled linen and arrange the tables for the morning’s coffee.  Only, at a farther table, a couvert for one person, set by itself, remained still untouched.

He happened to be alone in the room when the door again opened and a lady entered.  She did not see him behind his newspaper, and she walked languidly to the farther table and sat down.  As she did so she was seized with a fit of coughing, and when it was over she leaned her head on her hands, gasping.

Ashe had half risen—­the newspaper was crushed in his hand—­when the Swiss waitress whom the men of the inn called Fraeulein Anna—­who was, indeed, the daughter of the landlord—­came back.

“How are you, madame?” she said, with a smile, and in a slow English of which she was evidently proud.

“I’m better to-day,” said the other, hastily.  “I shall start to-morrow.  What a noise there is to-night!” she added, in a tone both fretful and weary.

“We are so full—­it is the accident to the road, madame.  Will madame have a the complet as before?”

The lady nodded, and Fraulein Anna, who evidently knew her ways, brought in the tea at once, stayed chatting beside her for a minute, and then departed, with a long, disapproving look at the gentleman in the corner who was so long over his coffee and would not let her clear away.