if he made up his mind to Alps and snow-fields, then Alps he would have, pure, simple, and unadulterated. No half-way houses for him! He would commune at first hand with the eternal hills; he would behold the free life of the mountain folk in all its unsophisticated and primitive simplicity.

So he gazed at his Tom Thumb boots with a regretful eye, and murmured pensively once more, “A perfect Bond Street!”

“What shall we do now?” Will Deverill asked, stopping short and glancing ahead towards the glaciers that close the valley.

“See that village on the left there,” Florian answered, in a rapt tone of sudden inspiration, seizing his arm theatrically; “⁠—⁠no, not the lower one on the edge of the level, but that high-perched group of little wooden houses with the green steeple by the edge of the ravine: what a magnificent view of the snow-fields to the south! From there, one must look at a single glance over all the spreading fingers and ramifications of the valley.”

“Perhaps there’s no inn there,” Will responded, dubiously.

“No inn! You prate to me of inns?” Florian exclaimed, striking an attitude. “In full view of these virgin peaks, you venture to raise a question of mere earthly bedrooms⁠—⁠landlord, waiter, chambermaid! Who cares where he sleeps⁠—⁠or whether he sleeps at all⁠—⁠in such a village as that?” He struck his stick on the ground hard to enforce and emphasise the absoluteness of his determination. “The die is cast,” he cried, with the Caesaric firmness of five-feet-nothing. “We cross the stream at once, and we make for the village!”

“Well, there’s probably somewhere we can put up for the night and reconnoitre the neighbourhood,” Will Deverill answered, as he followed his friend’s lead. “If the worst comes to the worst, we can fall back upon Zell; but the priest will most likely find us a lodging.”

No sooner said than done. They mounted the steep slope, and rose by gentle zig-zags towards the upland hamlet. At each step they took, the view over the glacier-bound peaks that close the glen to southward, opened wider and wider. Near an Alpine farmhouse they paused for breath. It was built of brown wood, toned and darkened by age, with projecting eaves and basking southern front, where endless cobs of Indian corn in treble tiers and rows hung out drying in the sunshine. Florian drank in the pretty picture with the intense enjoyment of youth and health and a rich sensuous nature. There was a human element, too, giving life to the foreground. Three Tyrolese children, a boy and two girls, in costumes more obtrusively national than they had yet observed, stood playing with one another on the platform in front of the farmhouse. Florian beamed on them, enchanted. “What innocence!” he cried, ecstatically. “What untrammelled forms! What freedom of limb! What Hellenic suppleness! How different from the cramped motions of our London-bred children! You can see in a moment those vigorous young muscles have strengthened themselves from the cradle in the bracing air of the mountains⁠—⁠so fresh they are, so lithe, so gracious, so lissom! I recognise there at once the true note of the Tyrol.”

As he spoke, the younger girl, playing roughly with the boy, gave him a violent push which nearly sent him over into a neighbouring puddle. At that, the elder sister clutched her hard by the wrist and gave her a good shaking, observing at the same time in very familiar accents:

“Naow then, Mariar-Ann, if you do like that to ’Arry agin, I’ll tike you stright in, an’ tell your mother.”

It was the genuine unmistakable Cockney dialect!

In an agony of injured nerves, Florian seized the elder girl by the collar of her dress, and, holding her at arm’s-length, as one might do some venomous reptile, demanded of her, sternly, in his severest tone: “Now, where on earth did you ever learn English?”

The little Tyrolese, trembling violently in his grasp, stammered out in deadly fear: “Wy, o’ course, in London.”

“Pa was a waiter at the Criterion,” the younger sister volunteered in a shrill little voice from a safe distance; “and ma’s an Englishwoman. We’ve come ’ere to retire. Pa’s tiken the farm. But we can’t none of us speak any German.”

Florian relaxed his grasp, a dejected, dispirited, disappointed mannikin. “Go, wretched little mudlark!” he exclaimed, with a frank gesture of discomfiture, flinging her from him as he spoke. “There isn’t, there never was, any objective Tyrol!”

The child retreated prudently to the safe shelter of the doorway, before venturing on a repartee. Then she put out her tongue and took up a stone in her hand. “Who are you a-callin’ a mudlark?” she answered, with the just indignation of injured innocence. “If my pa was ’ere ’e’d punch yer bloomin’ ’ead for yer.”

It ill became Florian Wood, that man of taste, to bandy words before the eternal hills with social waifs from the slums of Drury Lane. He strode on up the path in moody silence. It was some minutes, indeed, before he had sufficiently recovered from this crushing blow to murmur in a subdued voice: “What an incongruous circumstance!”

“Not so unusual as you’d suppose, though,” his companion answered with a smile; for he knew the Tyrol. “There are no people on earth so vagrant in their ways as the Tyrolese. They go away as pedlars, musicians, or waiters; but when they’ve made their pile, almost without exception, they come back in the end to their native valleys. I’ve more than once met hunters or farmers in these upland glens who spoke to me in English, not always without a tinge of American accent. Perhaps it’s not so much that these people emigrate as that they always come back again. They think other countries good enough to make money in, but the Zillerthal’s the one place where they’d care to spend it.”

Florian answered nothing. He strode on, sore distressed. The only Tyrol worth tuppence, he now knew to his cost, was the one he had erected, anterior to experience, in his own imagination.

CHAPTER II

A FRESH ACQUAINTANCE

It was a steep pull up to the little village on the hill, which Florian had selected by pure intuition for their immediate headquarters. But once they had arrived there the glorious panorama which disclosed itself in one burst to their enchanted eyes made them forget the fatigues of their long tramp to reach it. The village was a tiny one, but comely and prosperous; composed of great farm-houses with big boulders piled high on their shingled roofs to keep them in place, and a quaint old church, whose tall and tapering spire was prettily tiled with bright green slates, after the country fashion. Moreover, what was more important just then to the footsore travellers, a hospitable wirthshaus or village inn occupied a place of honour on the small green in the centre. It was cheerful though homely, and clean in a certain rough countrified way; and it faced due south, toward the sun and the snow-fields. Florian saw at a glance there would be a ravishing outlook from the bedroom windows; and Will Deverill, more practical, and better accustomed to these out-of-the-way nooks, felt inclined to believe they might count at least on decent beds, plain wholesome fare, fresh trout from the stream, and sweet venison from the mountains.

The name over the door was Andreas Hausberger. Will entered the inn with a polite inclination of the head, and inquired in his very best German of the first man he saw if he could speak