In Secret

Tethered by long cords attached to anklets over one leg the three pigeons walked busily around under the trees gorging themselves on last year's mast.

That afternoon they dared light a fire and made soup from the beef tablets in their packs--the first warm food they had tasted in a week.

A declining sun painted the crags in raw splendour; valleys were already dusky; a vast stretch of misty glory beyond the world of mountains to the north was Alsace; southward there was no end to the myriad snowy summits, cloud-like, piled along the horizon. The brief meal ended.

McKay set a pannikin of water to boil and returned to his yellow-haired comrade. Like some slim Swiss youth--some boy mountaineer--and clothed like one, Miss Erith sat at the foot of a tree in the ruddy sunlight studying once more the papers which McKay had discovered that morning among the bloody debris on the shelf of rock.

As he came up he knew he had never seen anything as pretty in his life, but he did not say so. Any hint of sentiment that might have budded had been left behind when they crossed the Swiss wire beyond Delle. An enforced intimacy such as theirs tended to sober them both; and if at times it preoccupied them, that was an added reason not only to ignore it but also to conceal any effort it might entail to take amiably but indifferently a situation foreseen, deliberately embraced, yet scarcely entirely discounted.

The girl was so pretty in her youth's clothing; her delicate ankles and white knees bare between the conventional thigh-length of green embossed leather breeches, rough green stockings, and fleece-lined hob-nailed shoes. And over the boy's shirt the mountaineer's frieze jacket!--with staghorn buttons. And the rough wool cuff fell on the hands of a duchess!--pistols at either hip, and a murderous Bavarian knife in front.

Glancing up at him where he stood under the red pine beside her: "I'll do the dishes presently," she said.

"I'll do them," he remarked, his eyes involuntarily seeking her hands.

A pink flush grew on her weather-tanned face--or perhaps it was the reddening sunlight stealing through some velvet piny space in the forest barrier. If it was a slight blush in recognition of his admiration she wondered at her capacity for blushing. However, Marie Antoinette coloured from temple to throat on the scaffold. But the girl knew that the poor Queen's fate was an enviable one compared to what awaited her if she fell into the hands of the Hun.

McKay seated himself near her. The sunny silence of the mountains was intense. Over a mass of alpine wild flowers hanging heavy and fragrant between rocky clefts two very large and intensely white butterflies fought a fairy battle for the favours of a third--a dainty, bewildering creature, clinging to an unopened bud, its snowy wings a-quiver.