Bower's face had grown cold and gray while the old man was speaking. He began to understand. Stampa would spare him none of the horror of the tragedy from which he fled like a lost soul when the news of it reached the hotel. Well, he would not draw back now. If Stampa and he were destined to have a settlement, why defer it? This was his day of reckoning,--of atonement, he hoped,--and he would not shirk the ordeal, though his flesh quivered and his humbled pride lashed him like a whip. The squalid stable was peculiarly offensive. Owing to the gale, the cattle that ought to be pasturing in the high alp were crowded there in reeking filth. Yesterday, not long before this hour, he was humming verses of cow songs to Helen, and beguiling the way to the Forno with a recital of the customs and idyls of the hills. What a spiteful thing was Fate! Why had this doting peasant risen from the dead to drag him through the mire of a past transgression? If Stampa betrayed anger, if his eyes and voice showed the scorn and hatred of a man justly incensed because of his daughter's untimely death, the situation would be more tolerable. But his words were mild, biting only by reason of their simple pathos. He spoke in a detached manner. He might be relating the unhappy story of some village maid of whom he had no personal knowledge. This complete self effacement grated on Bower's nerves. It almost spurred him again to ungovernable rage. But he realized the paramount need of self control. He clenched his teeth in the effort to bear his punishment without protest. And Stampa seemed to have the gift of divination. He read Bower's heart. By some means he became aware that the unsavory shed was loathsome to the fine gentleman standing beside him. "Etta was always so neat in her dress that it must have been a dreadful thing to see her laid there," he went on. "She fell just inside the door. Before she drank the poison she must have looked once at the top of old Corvatsch. She thought of me, I am sure, for she had my letter in her pocket telling her that I was at Pontresina with my voyageurs. And she would think of you too,--her lover, her promised husband." Bower cleared his throat. He tried to frame a denial; but Stampa waved the unspoken thought aside.