without long troubling herself to know who had written it.  “Do not let us talk about it any more, it is doubtless some lunatic,” she replied one day to Mlle. Moiseney, who kept constantly recurring to the incident whose mystery she burned to fathom.  The good demoiselle had been tempted to stop people in the road to ask, “Was it you?” Perchance she might have suspected her Bergun unknown to have a hand in the affair, had she had the least idea that he was at Saint Moritz, where she never had met him.  He came there, nevertheless, every day, but at his own time; besides, the hotels were full to overflowing, and it was very easy to lose one’s self in the crowd.

To tell the truth, when Count Abel Larinski came to Saint Moritz he was far less occupied with Mlle. Moriaz than with a certain illustrious chemist.  The air of the Engadine and the waters that tasted like ink had worked marvels:  in a week M. Moriaz felt like a new man.  There had come to him a most formidable appetite, and he could walk for hours at a time without becoming weary.  He abused his growing strength by constantly strolling through the mountains without a guide, hammer in hand; and every day, in spite of the remonstrances of his daughter, he increased the length of his excursions.  The more people know, the more inquisitive they become; and, when one is inquisitive, one can go to great lengths without feeling fatigue; one only becomes conscious of this after the exertion is over.  M. Moriaz never for a moment suspected that he was accompanied, at a respectful distance, on these solitary expeditions, by a stranger, who, with eyes and ears both on the alert, watched over him like a providence.  The most peculiar part of the affair was that this providence would gladly have caused him to take a misstep, or thrust him into some quagmire, in order to have the pleasure of drawing him out, and bearing him in his arms to the Hotel Badrutt.  “If only he could fall into a hole and break his leg!” Such was the daily wish of Count Abel Larinski; but savants have great license allowed them.  Although M. Moriaz was both corpulent and inclined to be absent-minded, he plunged into more than one quagmire without sticking fast, more than one marsh without having his progress impeded.

One morning he conceived the project of climbing up as high as a certain fortress of mountains whose battlements overhang a forest of pine and larch trees.  He was not yet sufficiently accustomed to the mountains to realize how deceptive distances become there.  After having drained two glasses of the chalybeate waters, and breakfasted heartily, he set out, crossed the Inn, and began the ascent to the forest.  The slope grew more and more abrupt, and ere long he discovered that he had wandered from the foot-path.  He was not one to be easily disheartened; he continued climbing, laying hold of the brushwood with his hands, planting his feet among perfidious pine-needles, which form