Lily watched the boys go down the hillside, and when they were lost to view she did not move from the door of the chalet. An onlooker might have said that her eyes searched the heights for tidings they alone could give her. A bitter wind blowing up the valley, a sky pregnant with omens of tempest, did not drive her back to the shelter of the house. She was unconscious of the cold, and took a cloak from the saturnine maid with a smile and a protest. "I really do not want it, Louise—I don’t feel the cold." "But, Madame, it is going to snow; you will be ill, Madame, and no one to nurse you." Lily put the cloak about her shoulders, and then asked the girl another question. "Can you see a lantern upon the hillside, Louise, up there below Vermala?" The maid, grown curious, came and stood with her, but declared she could see nothing. "There were gendarmes by here just now, Madame. I know them both, Albert and Philip, from Sion; there will have been trouble at the hotel, then; they would not send Monsieur Albert if it were not so." Lily nodded her head. "You do not often have trouble up here, Louise?" "Ah, Madame, the world is all the same whether you are up in the mountains or down in the valleys. There are wicked people at Andana, just as anywhere else. It would be one of the waiters who has robbed his master. There are Germans at Vermala, and they are all thieves—so, you see, the police must be here." Lily made no reply. The lanterns had come into view by this time, and could be seen dancing to and fro upon the high path which leads up to the hotel perched upon the plateau below the Zaat. It was apparent that the men were not searching the hillside as she had supposed; and, when she was sure of this, she shut the door and went back to the little library. Louise, meanwhile, had returned to the kitchen to prepare the modest supper which should be served at eight o’clock. Perhaps the gendarmes would pay the chalet a visit upon their return, in view of which possibility some culinary diligence was necessary. In the library, Lily sat down to her writing-table to finish a letter to her brother Harold, laid aside upon the appearance of the boys, and now taken up with reluctance. She had been trying to tell her brother to concern himself less with her affairs, and to be sure that whatever she might do, due regard would be paid to the interests and the scruples of others. Such a theme had been difficult enough before the boys appeared; but she found it quite impossible when they had left. Not a line could she write; not a sentence frame. A shadow had enveloped her suddenly, and she could not escape it.