“You have hurt me. Life has hurt me,” she said gently. “I don't mean to say that it was not partly my own fault, nor do I want to pose as an injured woman. But the fact remains, Syl, dear; and you must let time do what it can in the way of healing. If you care for me, see me a little oftener than you have done,--it will be good for both of us,--but don't speak of this again.” “Am I to go through a term of probation?” he asked. “Heaven forbid!” said Ella. There the matter remained. They met more frequently, became fast friends, and Sylvester waited. And so the two years slipped by. ***** It was a hot August day, and Lady Milmo sat in the verandah of the little hotel at Vitznau at the foot of the Righi, with a novel open on her lap. Her eyes were fixed idly upon a little speck of a boat on the lake by whose sides rose rhythmically tiny silver flashes. “Why don't you come _unexpectedly_ upon us here?” she had written to Sylvester, of whose arrival in Zermatt a chance-met wandering acquaintance had told her. “You will find the Righi _much_ more satisfactory than that silly Jungfrau. And you will find two people quite disposed to be very kind to you.” So Sylvester had left his ice-axes and ropes and mountaineering boots at Zermatt, and had flown on the wings of hope to Vitznau, and there he was with Ella in the little boat on the lake. Soon an approaching steamboat from Lucerne hid the tiny speck from Lady Milmo's view,-and gradually drew near. The inmates of the hotel came on to the verandah to watch the landing of the passengers, the morning's excitement. The gangway was thrust forward from the little jetty, and the crowd streamed ashore,--fresh English girls in straw hats, substantial fathers, anxious, lonely ladies with profusion of hand-baggage, Germans girt with satchel and vasculum, pacing sultanesquely in front of their womenkind, English parsons, happy and perspiring,--all amidst a sort of tangled undergrowth of umbrellas, and straps, and sticks, and alpenstocks purchased in Lucerne with the burnt-in names of inaccessible peaks circling round them. Some proceeded at once to the tiny railway station where the grotesquely slanting train awaited them. Others poured on to the verandah and took possession of the hotel. The gong for _dejeuner_ sounded. Lady Milmo looked anxiously at her speck, which had become visible again, and then at her watch. The occupants of the boat gave no sign of returning shorewards. They would be late for _table d'hôte_. Lady Milmo waved her pocket-handkerchief until she was the last person on the verandah, and then she went into the _salle-a-manger_ alone, feeling somewhat injured.