And she questioned the willingly communicative _cocher_ as to how long it might take to walk to the Château? “About an hour,” he replied. “A pleasant walk, too, Madame! One sees the lake and mountains nearly all the way.” This information decided her as to her plans. She knew that the eccentric wording of the Dimitrius advertisement required any applicant to present herself between six and eight in the morning, which was an ideal time for a walk in the bracing, brilliant Alpine air. So she determined to go on foot the very next day; and before she parted with the friendly driver, she had ascertained the exact position of the Château, and the easiest and quickest way to get there. And now,--having risen with the first peep of dawn, and attired herself in that becoming navy serge “model,” which her astute friend Sophy had borne triumphantly out of the French tailor’s emporium, she was on her way to the scene of her proposed adventure. She walked at a light, rapid pace--the morning was bright and cool, almost cold when the wind blew downward from the mountains, and she was delightfully conscious of that wonderful exhilaration and ease given to the whole physical frame by a clear atmosphere, purified by the constant presence of ice and snow. As she moved along in happiest mood, she thought of many things;--she was beginning to be amazed, as well as charmed, by the various changes which had, within a week, shaken her lately monotonous life into brilliant little patterns like those in a kaleidoscope. The web and woof of Circumstance was no longer all dull grey, like the colour her father had judged most suitable for her now that she was no longer young,--threads of rose and sky blue had found their hopeful way into the loom. Her days of housekeeping, checking tradesmen’s bills and flower-arranging seemed a very long way off; it was hardly credible to her mind that but a short time ago she had been responsible for the ordering of her parents’ lunches and dinners and the general management of the summer “change” at Rose Lea on the coast of Devon,--that fatal coast where she had been so cruelly drowned! Before leaving London, she had seen a few casual paragraphs in the newspapers concerning this disaster, headed “Bathing Fatality”--“Sad End of a Lady”--or “Drowned while Bathing,” but, naturally, being a nobody, she had left no gap in society,--she was only one of many needless women. And it was an altogether new and aspiring Diana May that found herself alive on this glorious morning in Switzerland; not the resigned, patient, orderly “old maid” with a taste for Jacobean embroidery and a wholesome dislike of the “snap-snap-snarl” humours of her father. “I never seem to have been my own real self till now!” she said inwardly. “And now I hardly realise that I have a father and mother at all! What a tyrannical bogy I have made of my ‘duty’ to them! And ‘love’ is another bogy!”