He was told the tremendous story of Trafford's leg; was shown it, and felt it; he interpolated thick and whistling noises to show how completely he followed their explanations, and then suddenly he began a speech that made all his earlier taciturnity seem but the dam of a great reservoir of mixed and partly incomprehensible English. He complimented Marjorie so effusively and relentlessly and shamelessly as to produce a pause when he had done. "Yes," he said, and nodded to button up the whole. He sucked his pipe, well satisfied with his eloquence. Trafford spoke in his silence. "We are coming down," he said. ("I thought, perhaps----" whispered Louis Napoleon.) "Yes," said Trafford, "we are coming down with you. Why not? We can get a sledge over the snow now? It's hard? I mean a flat sledge--like _this_. See? Like this." He got up and dragged Marjorie's old arrangement into view. "We shall bring all the stuff we can down with us, grub, blankets--not the tent, it's too bulky; we'll leave a lot of the heavy gear." "You'd have to leave the tent," said Louis Napoleon. "I _said_ leave the tent." "And you'd have to leave ... some of those tins." "Nearly all of them." "And the ammunition, there;--except just a little." "Just enough for the journey down." "Perhaps a gun?" "No, not a gun. Though, after all,--well, we'd return one of the guns. Give it you to bring back here." "Bring back here?" "If you liked." For some moments Louis Napoleon was intently silent. When he spoke his voice was guttural with emotion. "After," he said thoughtfully and paused, and then resolved to have it over forthwith, "all you leave will be mine? Eh?" Trafford said that was the idea. Louis Napoleon's eye brightened, but his face preserved its Indian calm. "I will take you right to Hammond's," he said, "Where they have dogs. And then I can come back here...." § 2 They had talked out nearly every particular of their return before they slept that night; they yarned away three hours over the first generous meal that any one of them had eaten for many weeks. Louis Napoleon stayed in the hut as a matter of course, and reposed with snores and choking upon Marjorie's sledge and within a yard of her. It struck her as she lay awake and listened that the housemaids in Sussex Square would have thought things a little congested for a lady's bedroom, and then she reflected that after all it wasn't much worse than a crowded carriage in an all-night train from Switzerland. She tried to count how many people there had been in that compartment, and failed. How stuffy that had been--the smell of cheese and all! And with that, after a dream that she was whaling and had harpooned a particularly short-winded whale she fell very peacefully into oblivion. Next day was spent in the careful preparation of the two sledges. They intended to take a full provision for six weeks, although they reckoned that with good weather they ought to be down at Hammond's in four.