When the train at night-fall brought them to their journey’s end at the edge of one of the lakes, Lydia was glad that they were not, as usual, to pass from one solitude to another. Their wanderings during the year had indeed been like the flight of outlaws: through Sicily, Dalmatia, Transylvania and Southern Italy they had persisted in their tacit avoidance of their kind. Isolation, at first, had deepened the flavor of their happiness, as night intensifies the scent of certain flowers; but in the new phase on which they were entering, Lydia’s chief wish was that they should be less abnormally exposed to the action of each other’s thoughts. She shrank, nevertheless, as the brightly-looming bulk of the fashionable Anglo-American hotel on the water’s brink began to radiate toward their advancing boat its vivid suggestion of social order, visitors’ lists, Church services, and the bland inquisition of the _table-d’hôte_. The mere fact that in a moment or two she must take her place on the hotel register as Mrs. Gannett seemed to weaken the springs of her resistance. They had meant to stay for a night only, on their way to a lofty village among the glaciers of Monte Rosa; but after the first plunge into publicity, when they entered the dining-room, Lydia felt the relief of being lost in a crowd, of ceasing for a moment to be the centre of Gannett’s scrutiny; and in his face she caught the reflection of her feeling. After dinner, when she went upstairs, he strolled into the smoking-room, and an hour or two later, sitting in the darkness of her window, she heard his voice below and saw him walking up and down the terrace with a companion cigar at his side. When he came up he told her he had been talking to the hotel chaplain--a very good sort of fellow. “Queer little microcosms, these hotels! Most of these people live here all summer and then migrate to Italy or the Riviera. The English are the only people who can lead that kind of life with dignity--those soft-voiced old ladies in Shetland shawls somehow carry the British Empire under their caps. _Civis Romanus sum_. It’s a curious study--there might be some good things to work up here.” He stood before her with the vivid preoccupied stare of the novelist on the trail of a “subject.” With a relief that was half painful she noticed that, for the first time since they had been together, he was hardly aware of her presence. “Do you think you could write here?” “Here? I don’t know.” His stare dropped. “After being out of things so long one’s first impressions are bound to be tremendously vivid, you know. I see a dozen threads already that one might follow--” He broke off with a touch of embarrassment. “Then follow them. We’ll stay,” she said with sudden decision. “Stay here?” He glanced at her in surprise, and then, walking to the window, looked out upon the dusky slumber of the garden. “Why not?” she said at length, in a tone of veiled irritation.