"We should have old Gordon Snagg on our backs if we’d stayed down there," he said. "I know the old bounder well—he always stops to tell you some yarn about his brother, the brewer, and falls down in the middle of it. He got me yesterday. That nut, Major Boodle, was with him and the lady, of course. Lady Coral-Smith’s a pretty good weight when she’s round your neck, but I’d sooner see her round the major’s. Did you hear her trying to tell something about the ’little widow’ this morning? Beastly shame, I call it—the little thing’s all alone, and worth about two hundred of the rest of them. Now don’t you think so yourself, Nellie?" He had not called her Nellie before, and she remarked the circumstance, and pronounced it to be of good omen. Fearing no possible rival in the "little widow," Nellie could afford to be generous. "She is very pretty, and very nice," she said. "I am sorry for her, because she has lost her husband—at least I should be, if I knew what kind of a husband he was. It’s all guess-work with widows; you never quite know whether to be sorry or glad." Bob laughed loudly. "They’re saying in the hotel that she hasn’t lost him. Bess Bethune hints that he wouldn’t be lost. That’s a new sort of game, I suppose: trying to lose a husband and counting points against yourself when he turns up! Do you think you would like to play it when you are married?" She was horribly shocked. The word "husband" was sacrosanct, and such trifling seemed to her next door to a sacrilege. "Oh, do let’s talk of something sensible," she exclaimed petulantly. "Wherever there is a pretty woman, there will people tell untruths about her. What is it to us? We don’t care, do we?" Bob shook his head; he liked to pose as a man of the world. "I think we ought to stand by her," he said. "Suppose you had been in the case, Nellie; wouldn’t you expect me to stand by you?" "Of course I should—but you wouldn’t do it; you would begin to talk about widows instead. I’m quite sorry I came with you—" He looked up appealingly. "But we’re having such a jolly time together. You don’t mean to say you would sooner have been with old Gordon Snagg?" "I would sooner be with somebody who talked about sensible things, so there! Are you going to stand here all day looking down at nothing? I didn’t come out for that; I came to ski. Perhaps you would like to go back to the paper-chase?" Bob hastened to say that he hoped the paper-chase might be swallowed up by an avalanche before he overtook it. Having insisted upon the point, he seized her hand without so much as a by-your-leave or any other unnecessary absurdity, and began to run down the slope with her. Here was something to live for; they were as two who had conquered the world and returned its proud heights upon wings of azure.