"I am, however, a somewhat abstemious man." Hallam went into the building and returned with a cigar-case and a bottle.

The contents of both were good, and Deringham sat languidly glancing over the curling smoke towards the glimmering snow.

It towered white and cold against a pale green, shining high above climbing pines and dusky valley, while the fleecy mist crept higher and higher athwart the serried waves of trees that fell to the river hollow.

Alice Deringham saw it, and drinking in the wonderful freshness that came down from the peaks and permeated the silence of the valley, realized a little of that great white rampart's awful serenity.

She also wondered vacantly what the two men on the verandah were talking about; but in this she was wrong, for Hallam, overcharged with Western vivacity, was talking, and her father waiting quietly.
"No," said the former, returning to the subject with an affectation of naive directness.