Florian pursed his thin lips, and knitted his white brow judicially. “H’m, h’m,” he said, with slow deliberateness. “It’s as bad as that, is it? Why, Deverill, I assure you, I’ve rarely—if ever—been as serious as this in all my life before. Don’t look at me like that. I mean just what I say. I’m not thinking about the girl, but about _you_, my dear fellow. The morals of these parts, as you very well know, are primitive—primitive. It won’t do _her_ much harm, even if it gets noised about, to have been seen on the hills, alone in the grey dawn, hand in hand with an Englishman. This is no place for Oriental seclusion of women. Indeed, from what I hear, the Arcadian relations of these unchaperoned alp-girls with their lovers from the plains must be something truly sweet in their unaffected simplicity. Herr Hausberger was telling me last night that when an alp-girl marries, all the hunters and peasants, her discarded lovers, whom she has admitted to the intimacy of her châlet on the mountains, leave a cradle at the door of her chosen husband on the night of the wedding. The good man wakes up the morning after his marriage to find staring him in the face, on his own threshold, these tangible proofs of his wife’s little slips in her spinster existence. . . . It’s a charming custom. I find it quite economical. He knows the worst at once. It saves him the trouble, so common among ourselves, of finding them out for himself piecemeal in the course of his later relations.” “You are wandering from the question,” Will interrupted, testily. He didn’t quite relish these generalised innuendoes against poor Linnet’s character. “Not at all, not at all,” Florian went on very gravely. “The point of these remarks lies in the application thereof, as Captain Cuttle puts it. . . . When Linnet marries, you mean, I suppose, to increase the number of the delicate little offerings presented at her door by——” Will started up and glared at him. “You shall not speak like that,” he cried in a very angry voice, “of such a girl as Linnet.” The little man waved one dainty white hand with a deprecating gesture towards his excited friend. “This is too bad,” he said, sighing, “very bad indeed, far worse than I imagined. I said it on purpose, just to see what you were driving at. And I find out the worst. If you mean the girl no harm, and take a slighting little jest on her to heart like that, why your case is desperate—an aggravated attack, complicated by incipient matrimonial symptoms. You need change of air, change of scene, change of company. Law of Medes and Persians, it’s Innsbruck to-morrow! You go with me as I bid, or I go without you. Demur, and I leave you at once to your fate. You may stop with your cow-girl.” “Don’t speak of her by that name!” Will broke in, half-angrily.