“Oh, yes, we are not here merely for pleasure--_comme ces autres_”---Madame de Varigny gestured smilingly towards a merry party of men and girls who had just come in from luging and were stamping the snow from off their feet amid gay little outbursts of chaff and laughter. “We are here just as last year, when we first made the acquaintance of Monsieur Peterson”--the suddenly muted quality of her voice implied just the right amount of sympathetic recollection--“so that _mon pauvre mari_ may assure himself of yet another year of health.” The faintly ironical gleam in her eyes convinced Jean that, as she had shrewdly begun to suspect, the little Count was a _malade imaginaire_, and once she found herself wondering what could be the circumstances responsible for the union of two such dissimilar personalities as the high-bred, hypochondriacal little Count and the rather splendid-looking but almost certainly plebeian-born woman who was his wife. She intended, later on, to ask her father if he could supply the key to the riddle, but he had contrived to drift off during the course of her conversation with the Varignys, and, when at last she found herself free to join him, he had disappeared altogether. She thought it very probable that he had gone out to watch the progress of a ski-ing match to which he had referred with some enthusiasm earlier in the day, and she smiled a little at the characteristic way in which he had extricated himself, at her expense, from the inconvenience of his unexpected recontre with the Varignys. But, two hours later, she realised that once again his superficial air of animation had deceived her. From her window she saw him coming along the frozen track that led from the hillside cemetery, and for a moment she hardly recognised her father in that suddenly shrank, huddled figure of a man, stumbling down the path, his head thrust forward and sunken on his breast. Her first imperative instinct was to go and meet him. Her whole being ached with the longing to let him feel the warm rush of her sympathy, to assure him that he was not utterly alone. But she checked the impulse, recognising that he had no use for any sympathy or love which she could give. She had never really been anything other than exterior to his life, outside his happiness, and now she felt intuitively that he would wish her to remain equally outside the temple of his grief. He was the type of man who would bitterly resent the knowledge that any eyes had seen him at a moment of such utter, pitiable self-revelation, and it was the measure of her understanding that Jean waited quietly till he should choose to come to her. “When he came, he had more or less regained his customary poise, though he still looked strained and shaken. He addressed her abruptly. “I’ve decided to go straight on to Marseilles and sail by the next boat, Jean. There’s one I can catch if I start at once.” “At once?” she exclaimed, taken aback. “You don’t mean--to-day?” He nodded.