“Get out!” was all Rex answered, but his face brightened at the three bad boys standing in a row with their hats all held politely against their stomachs. He had not meant to tell them, dreading the fatigue of explanations, but by an impulse he held out his hand to them. “I say, you fellows, shake hands! I’m going off tomorrow.” Their surprise having been more or less noisily and profusely expressed, Braith stepped decidedly in between them and his patient, satisfied their curiosity, and gently signified that it was time to go. He only permitted one shake apiece, foiling all Clifford’s rebellious attempts to dodge around him and embrace Gethryn. But Rex was lying back by this time, tired out, and he was glad when Braith closed the studio door. It flew open the next minute and an envelope came spinning across to Rex. “Letter in your box, Reggy—good-bye, old chap!” said Clifford’s voice. The door did not quite close again and the voices and steps of his departing friends came echoing back as Braith raised a black-edged letter from the floor. It bore the postmark: Vernon. CHAPTER XII. R ound about the narrow valley which is cut by the rapid Trauerbach, Bavarian mountains tower, their well timbered flanks scattered here and there with rough slides, or opening out in long green alms, and here at evening one may sometimes see a spot of yellow moving along the bed of a half dry mountain torrent. Miss Ruth Dene stood in front of the Forester’s lodge at Trauerbach one evening at sunset, and watched such a spot on the almost perpendicular slope that rose opposite, high above her head. Some Jaegers and the Forester were looking, too. “My glass, Federl! Ja! ’s ist’n gams!” “Gems?” inquired Miss Dene, excited by her first view of a chamois. “Ja! ’n Gams,” said the Forester, sticking to his dialect. The sun was setting behind the Red Peak, his last rays pouring into the valley. They fell on rock and alm, on pine and beech, and turned the silver Trauerbach to molten gold. Mr Isidor Blumenthal, sitting at a table under one of the windows, drinking beer, beheld this phenomenon, and putting down his quart measure, he glared at the waste of precious metal. Then he lighted the stump of a cigar; then he looked at his watch, and it being almost supper time, he went in to secure the best place. He liked being early at table; he liked the first cut of the meats, hot and fat; he loved plenty of gravy. While waiting to be served he could count the antlers on the walls and estimate “how much they would fetch by an antiquar,” as he said to himself. There was nothing else marketable in the large bare room, full of deal tables and furnished with benches built against the wall. But he could pick his teeth demonstratively—toothpicks were not charged in the bill—and he could lean back on two legs of his chair, with his hands in his pockets, and stare through the windows at Miss Dene.