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disgustingly self-assured and complacent. They were therefore able to retire to their beds with philosophy.
    Since then Herr Scholtz had been observed in conversation with a well-preserved widow of fifty who unfortunately was obliged to retire to her own room every evening at nine o’clock for reasons of health and was, therefore, unable to go dancing with him, as he longed to do. Captain Forster took his tea every afternoon in a cafe where there was a charming waitress who might have been Rosa’s sister.
    The two gentlemen looked through each other in the dining-room, and each crossed the street if he saw the other approaching. There was a look about them which suggested that they might be thinking Switzerland—at any rate, so late in the season—was not all that it had been.
    Gallant, however, they both continued to be; and they might continually be observed observing the social scene of flirtations and failures and successes with the calm authority of those well-qualified by long familiarity with it to assess and make judgements. Men of weight, they were; men of substance; men who expected deference.
    And yet … here they were seated on opposite sides of that table in the last sunlight, the mountains rising about them, all mottled white and brown and green with melting spring, thewarm sun folding delicious but uncertain arms around them—and surely they were entitled to feel aggrieved? Captain Forster—a lean, tall, military man, carefully suntanned, spruced, brushed—was handsome still, no doubt of it. And Herr Scholtz—large, rotund, genial, with infinite resources of experience—was certainly worth more than the tea-time confidences of a widow of fifty?
    Unjust to be sixty on such a spring evening; particularly hard with Rosa not ten paces away, shrugging her shoulders in a low-cut embroidered blouse.
    And almost as if she were taking a pleasure in the cruelty, she suddenly stopped humming and leaned forward over the balustrade. With what animation did she wave and call down the street, while a very handsome young man below waved and called back. Rosa watched him stride away, and then she sighed and turned, smiling dreamily.
    There sat Herr Scholtz and Captain Forster gazing at her with hungry resentful appreciation.
    Rosa narrowed her blue eyes with anger and her mouth went thin and cold, in disastrous contrast with her tenderness of a moment before. She shot bitter looks from one gentleman to the other, and then she yawned again. This time it was a large, contemptuous, prolonged yawn; and she tapped the back of her hand against her mouth for emphasis and let out her breath in a long descending note, which, however, was cut off short as if to say that she really had no time to waste even on this small demonstration. She then swung past them in a crackle of starched print, her heels tapping. She went inside.
    The terrace was empty. Gay painted tables, striped chairs, flowery sun umbrellas—all were in cold shadow, save for the small corner where the gentlemen sat. At the same moment, from the same impulse, they rose and pushed the table forward into the last well of golden sunlight. And now they looked at each other straight and frankly laughed.
    “Will you have a drink?” enquired Herr Scholtz in English, and his jolly smile was tightened by a consciously regretful stoicism. After a moment’s uncertainty, during which Captain Forster appeared to be thinking that the stoicism was too early an admission of defeat, he said, “Yes—yes. Thanks, I will.”
    Herr Scholtz raised his voice sharply, and Rosa appearedfrom indoors, ready to be partly defensive. But now Herr Scholtz was no longer a suppliant. Master to servant, a man who habitually employed labour, he ordered wine without looking at her once. And Captain Forster was the picture of a silky gentleman.
    When she reappeared with the wine they were so deep in good fellowship they might have been saying aloud how foolish it was to allow the sound