It was their second day in the mountains. Blair, going down-stairs very early in the morning, stopped in the office of the hotel to write a brief but intensely polite note to his mother, telling her of his marriage. "Nannie will have broken it to her--poor, dear old Nannie!" he said to himself, pounding a stamp down on the envelope, "but of course it's proper to announce it myself." Then he dropped the "announcement" into the post-bag, and went out for a tramp in the woods. It was a still, furtive morning of low clouds, with an expectancy of snow in the air. But it was not cold, and when, leaving the road and pushing aside the frosted ferns and underbrush, he found himself in the silence of the woods, he sat down on a fallen tree trunk to think.... The moment had come when the only god he knew would no longer be denied. "I might as well face it," he said; and slowly lit a cigar. But instead of "facing it," he began to watch the first sparse and fitful beginnings of snow--hesitant flakes that sauntered down to rest for a crystal moment on his coat sleeve. Suddenly he caught his thoughts together with a jerk: "I've _got_ to think it out!" he said. Curiously enough, when he said this his thought did not turn with any especial distinctness to David Richie. Instead, in the next hour of reasonings and excuses, there was always, back in his mind, one face--scornful, contemptuous even; a face he had known only as gentle, and sometimes tender; the face of David's mother. Once he swore at himself, to drive that face out of his mind. "What a fool I am! Elizabeth had broken her engagement with him. I had the right to speak before the thing was smoothed over again. Anybody would say so, even--even Mrs. Richie if she could really understand how things were. But of course she will only see _his_ side." All his excuses for his conduct were in relation to David Richie; he did not think of Elizabeth. He honestly did not know that he had wronged her. He loved her so crazily that he could not realize his cruelty.