"Well," he exclaimed rather pettishly, "why doesn’t he go and pick him up? I expect it’s all my eye; people don’t fall off the Zaat, of all places. Why don’t you tell him so, Bob?" "He speaks _patois_—mine’s no good to him. You have a shot, Dick, or perhaps Miss Marjory will?" They laughed at this, and the Frenchman turned away in despair. These English assuredly were mad and without pity. He had told his story to half a dozen of them already, and all the answer he got was the gibberish of a tongue spoken neither in heaven nor on earth. Obviously, he must find one of his own countrymen, and they must go together to the slopes above. Failing that, he would return, and telephone to the police; an alternative which so pleased him that he was already half-way down to the hotel, when Benny, who had appeared on the scene again, overtook him and entered immediately into an exciting argument. Benny spoke French like a true Parisian—the stranger had no difficulty in understanding him. The others, meanwhile, had gone down to the village of Andana. There in a little café, ordinarily shut during the winter, the hares and hounds browsed upon a common pasture. And curiously enough, while Bob and Dick ate with good appetite, their mood was hardly as joyous as it should have been; while those interesting young ladies, Miss Marjory and Miss Nellie Rider, wore already something of the staid demeanour of the married woman. It was not until after lunch and much good Malvoisie that the young men drew aside to debate the situation in anxious whispers. Assuredly, as Bob admitted, they had "done it," and time alone and that far from amiable old lady, Mrs. Rider, could show them the way out. In short, as Dick added savagely: "they were in a devil of a mess." *CHAPTER X* *A SPECIALIST IS CONSULTED* The amiable discussion, begun in the interval after lunch, was continued at the Palace Hotel during that pleasant hour when tea is a memory and dinner an expectation. The girls had gone up to their room by this time, hand in hand, and tremulous with the powers of suppressed narration. For them the supreme issue concerned an amiable lady who was quite in ignorance of the surprise prepared for her, and would certainly shed tears when the amatory bombshell exploded. For the youths it was another matter altogether. Conscience had begun to twit them with melancholy gibes upon their rashness. Or, as Bob put it tersely, a couple of wives and three hundred and ninety pounds a year between the pair of them. That was the bald truth. It had seemed otherwise in the woods when the sun shone, and the great mountains looked down kindly upon the lovers.