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had worn sometimes the night before. He wanted her to be gay, and carefree, and enjoy herself, and that much he did tell her as once more the high peaks turned rosy with the sunset, and the valley filled slowly with a grape-like bloom before it was abruptly blotted out by the coming of the night.
    “We must do this often,” he said, “or as often as you can manage. It will do you good. You were far too pale last night.”
    “Was I ? ” she returned carelessly, contentedly. “But redheads are always pale. You should know that.”
    “How long do you think Miss Morgan will stay on here ? ” he asked, frowning at the lights of the hotel as they approached it.
    “I don’t know. As long as the Baron von Felden stays, I should think,” Valentine added, with a little smile.
    “And he’s such an unknown quantity that it would be impossible to predict how long he’ll stay.”
    She glanced at him quickly.
    “Would you say he’s an unknown quantity ? It hasn’t struck me that there’s anything pretentious about him. The local people know him, and he’s very well vouched for.”
    “I didn’t mean that. I mean that ... he, in himself, is an unknown quantity! He probably doesn’t know himself what he wants from life! He’s a drifter, aimless, without any sense of direction. Deprived of all the trappings that made his title valuable he’s a little bit pathetic too.”
    “You mean he’s a playboy ? ”
    Haversham shrugged.
    “A gigolo, perhaps. I wouldn’t know. But the ladies love him, don’t they? Miss Morgan isn’t the only one.”
    Valentine had been aware of that ever since she had been aware of the Baron. Feminine eyes followed him everywhere, and he couldn’t help but be aware of it. And when everyone in the hotel, from the bell-boy upwards, addressed him as Excellency, he must realise that that, too, added to his appeal for lonely widows with big bank balances, and impressionable young women with the eternal feminine in their hearts, and a desire for romance above everything else.
    If he was a gigolo it was because women made him that very thing. Because so many of them wanted it that way, and he was too hard up to have principles.
    When they reached the hotel he was standing in the brightly lighted entrance, and he saw them at once as they passed inside. Lou was apparently nowhere about.
    “You did very well,” he told Valentine, as she would have passed him by. “With practice you will do better, but you did very well.”
    She sensed that Haversham, at her side, resented the criticism, but the Baron did not even acknowledge him. He was leaning back against the panelled wall to be out of the way of the ski-sticks and the returning skiers, and a pair of elk horns above his head in some way emphasised the brooding dark beauty of his face, with its thickly lashed eyes. A cigarette smouldered between his fingers, and as Valentine looked up at him a thin column of smoke rose between them and the severe black sweater he was wearing, with a wine-dark muffler wound about his neck and tucked into the front of it. And she had a momentary recollection of a black shape that had shot out above her head, and right across the valley, while she was clinging to a dizzy ledge earlier that afternoon.
    She knew now that it was the Baron who was demonstrating not merely his close affinity with a pair of skis, but his ability to take note of what was going on around him while in mid-flight as it were.
    “Where is Lou?” she asked, rather stupidly, standing still to put the question although Haversham would plainly have preferred to go straight on to the lift.
    The black shoulder shrugged.
    “She was not in a very good mood when we came in. Rather cross.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know.” His dark eyes were cynically amused. “Ought I to know?”
    But upstairs Lou revealed immediately why she was cross. They had spent the entire afternoon hanging about, as she phrased it, doing nothing in particular, although she had