.«
    »If you are thinking of tyrants, it may be so. Say the tyrant dies?«
    »The prison-gates are unlocked and out comes a skeleton. But why will you
talk of skeletons! The very name of mountain seems life in comparison with any
other subject.«
    »I assure you,« said Vernon, with the fervour of a man lighting on an actual
truth in his conversation with a young lady, »it's not the first time I have
thought you would be at home in the Alps. You would walk and climb as well as
you dance.«
    She liked to hear Clara Middleton talked of, and of her having been thought
of: and giving him friendly eyes, barely noticing that he was in a glow, she
said, »If you speak so encouragingly I shall fancy we are near an ascent.«
    »I wish we were,« said he.
    »We can realize it by dwelling on it, don't you think?«
    »We can begin climbing.«
    »Oh!« she squeezed herself shadowily.
    »Which mountain shall it be?« said Vernon in the right real earnest tone.
    Miss Middleton suggested a lady's mountain first, for a trial. »And then, if
you think well enough of me - if I have not stumbled more than twice, or asked
more than ten times how far it is from the top, I should like to be promoted to
scale a giant.«
    They went up some of the lesser heights of Switzerland and Styria, and
settled in South Tyrol, the young lady preferring this district for the
strenuous exercise of her climbing powers because she loved Italian colour; and
it seemed an exceedingly good reason to the genial imagination she had awakened
in Mr. Whitford: »Though,« said he abruptly, »you are not so much Italian as
French.«
    She hoped she was English, she remarked.
    »Of course you are English; ... yes.« He moderated his assent with the
halting affirmative.
    She inquired wonderingly why he spoke in apparent hesitation.
    »Well, you have French feet, for example: French wits; French impatience,«
he lowered his voice, »and charm.«
    »And love of compliments.«
    »Possibly. I was not conscious of paying them.«
    »And a disposition to rebel?«
    »To challenge authority, at least.«
    »That is a dreadful character.«
    »At all events it is a character.«
    »Fit for an Alpine comrade?«
    »For the