“Up there!” he pointed towards the pine-woods. “Above the woods there is a hut of sorts--erected as a shelter in case of sudden storms for people coming up from the lower valley to Montavan and beyond. It’s a rough little shanty, but it would serve very well as a temporary salle à manger. It isn’t a long climb,” he added persuasively. “Are you too tired to take it on after your recent exertion?” “Not in the least. But are you expecting a wayside refuge of that description to be miraculously endowed with a well-furnished larder?” “No. But I think my knapsack can make good the deficiency.” he replied composedly. Jean looked at him with dancing eyes. Having once yielded to the day’s unconventional adventure, she had surrendered herself whole-heartedly to the enjoyment of it. She made one reservation, however. Some instinct of self-protection prevented her from enlightening her companion as to her partly English nationality. There was no real necessity for it, seeing that he spoke French with the utmost fluency, and his assumption that she was a Frenchwoman seemed in some way to limit the feeling of intimacy, conferring on her, as it were, a little of the freedom of an incognito. “_A la bonne heure!_” she exclaimed gaily. “So you invite me to share your lunch, _monsieur le professeur?_” “I’ve invited you to share my day, haven’t I?” he replied, smiling. They steered for the bank, and when he had helped off her skates and removed his own, slinging them over his arm, they started off along the steep white track which wound its way upwards through the pine-woods. As they left the bright sunlight that still glittered on the snowy slopes behind them, it seemed as though they plunged suddenly into another world--a still, mysterious, twilit place, where the snow underfoot muffled the sound of their steps and the long shadows of the pines barred their path with sinister, distorted shapes. Jean, always sensitive to her surroundings, shivered a little. “It’s rather eerie, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s just as if someone had suddenly turned the lights out.” “Quite a nice bit of symbolism,” he returned enigmatically. “How? I don’t think I understand.” He laughed a little. “How should you? You’re young. Fate doesn’t come along and snuff out the lights for you when you are--what shall we say? Eighteen?” “You’re two years out,” replied Jean composedly. “As much? Then let’s hope you’ll have so much the longer to wait before Madame Destiny comes round with her snuffers.” He spoke with a kind of bitter humour, the backwash, surely, of some storm through which he must have passed. Jean looked across at him with a vague trouble in her face. “Then, do you think”--she spoke uncertainly--“do you believe it is inevitable that she will come--sooner or later?” “I hope not--to you,” he said gently. “But she comes to most of us.”