They lunched in a sunny airy corner of the big bare _salle-à-manger_ merrily enough, or with that seeming gaiety of heart which brightens so many a board, notwithstanding that the stream flows darkly enough below the ripple and the gleam. Daphne had made it the business of her life to seem happy and at ease ever since that fatal night at Fribourg. She wanted Gerald Goring to believe that she was satisfied with her lot—nay, even that she was honestly attached to her plighted husband, and that her conduct that night had been but a truant impulse, a momentary aberration from common sense and duty. She was fighting her battle bravely, sometimes smiling with an aching heart, sometimes really succeeding in being happy, with the inconsiderate unreasoning happiness of youth and health, and the rapture of living in a world where all was alike new and beautiful. After luncheon she went out with Edgar for another ramble, until it should be time to begin the descent to Lauterbrunnen. They had all agreed to walk down, in a leisurely way, after tea; and the horses had already gone back with the two men who had led them up. Daphne wanted to learn where and how she could get nearest to the mountains. It seemed provoking to see them there, so near, and yet as far beyond her reach as if she had been looking at them from her window at Interlaken. ‘Would it really be too much for an afternoon walk?’ she asked, gazing longingly at the Silberhorn. Gerald explained the preparations and the assistance, and the length of time which would be required for any attempt upon that snowy crest. ‘Please show me the very ledge where the child’s red frock used to be seen,’ she asked, perusing the wilderness of crag and peak. ‘What child? what frock?’ asked Edgar. ‘Don’t you know that ever so many years ago a lammergeier carried off a child from this village of Mürren, and alighted with it upon an inaccessible shelf of rock on the side of the Jungfrau, and that for years afterwards some red scraps, the remnants of the poor baby’s clothes, were seen amongst the snow?’ ‘A pitiful story, wherever you found it,’ said Gerald; ‘but I think the baby’s frock would have been blown away or buried under the snow before the vulture had forgotten the flavour of the baby.’