"You won’t forget," he said as he turned at her gate and drew the collar of his heavy coat about his ears. She answered that she would expect Benny sometime during the morning, and immediately went in to ask her servant if anyone had come. When Louise retorted with a shrug of the shoulders and the inquiry, "Who would come upon such a night?" Madame had nothing to say. The hours were making it very difficult for her to believe the best. The dawn found her still awake, and quite prepared for that hour of crisis which such a life as Luton’s had made inevitable. *CHAPTER XII* *FLIGHT* The Abbé Villari slept at Benny’s chalet that night, fearful of the storm, and not a little concerned at the absence of its master. This anxiety he shared with Jack, who suggested a hundred reasons which might have taken Benny to Sierre, but none which could have kept him there—unless it were the storm, which in the case of such a man seemed altogether insufficient. "He’ll have gone down to see if the stuff has come," Jack declared with conviction; "they say at the stables that he engaged a sleigh shortly after ten o’clock. I know he’s ordered a lot of things, and he was particularly anxious to have the new steel arms for the frame. If the snow’s very bad down there, the fellow who drives the sleigh may have refused to come up, and then Benny would be on his own. That wouldn’t matter much to him, though, for he’s as tough as old leather, and would just as soon walk up as ride. I can’t think why he hasn’t done it, Abbé." The abbé agreed, although he had a poor opinion of some of the coachmen at Andana. "The fellows like to spend a night in the town," he said, with a suggestion of ascetic regret. "It is difficult for a stranger to think of Sierre in such a light, but, after all, these things are a question of opportunity. A showman with a bear is a great person in a village where they have never seen bears, and so a man with a fiddle is an orchestra for people who have no music. I should imagine that André has refused to come back, and that your brother will remain at the Terminus Hotel. If so, he will be very comfortable, for the wines are excellent, and nobody would quarrel with the cooking. I think we had better say that he has done so, and go on with our work. There is nothing so unprofitable as speculation when time alone can tell us the truth."