No Hero

erings as we traversed the always crowded terrace. Bob Evers, no doubt, would have turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to them. I myself could pretend to do so, bu

Beneath us were the serracs of the Gorner Glacier, teased and tousled like a fringe of frozen breakers. Beyond the serracs was the main stream of comparatively smooth ice, with its mourning band of moraine, and beyond that the mammoth sweep and curve of the Théodule where these glaciers

t to won

d to me last night

r Mrs. Lascelles. I thoroughly approved, but was

n't know how,

lephane; you recognised me

said I, poking about with the

now yo

making me

s very good of you to give me the chance, if rather unnecessary. I am not a criminal. Still you could have made m

to open up a painful subject, well, the pain be upon her own head. Yet I must say that there was very little of it in her face as our eyes met. There was the eager candour that one could not help admiring, with the glowing l

a genuine smile at my disingenuous face. "When you met me before i

remem

emember m

fect

ou eve

bled. I drop

he papers. It's no use pretending I didn't, nor yet th

ch has the ring of a good intention, and is thus inoffensive except to such as seek excuses for offence. My instincts about Mrs. Lascelles did not place her in thi

once more. She had regained an equal mastery of face and voice, and the

I, smiling with th

ut myself from that time on,

rson whom I should t

, Captain

you didn't say anything that gave you pa

Lascelles's smile, a rather pathetic

ear a good deal while you are fairly young. I want you to know more about me, because I believe yo

nt of us, such a vivid green against

there," I said. "I take abo

an anybody else! He doesn't even suspect. It would have hurt me, yes, it would have hurt even me, to be

s I took out a cigarette. The case reminded me of the ni

l there isn't quite so much to give away as there might have been. A divorce, of course, is always a divorce; there

ay in life. It was a sudden feeling, an unpremeditated look, but I might as well have spoken aloud. Mrs. Lasc

ou may think what you like of me for saying so to a comparative stranger; but I won't have your symp

ian regiment. But the ma

you may have been desperate in the first instance; you may have said to yourself that the fire couldn't be much worse than the frying-pan. In that case, of course, you deserve no sympathy, and nothing is more irritating to me than the sympathy I don't deserve. It's a matter of temperament; I'm obliged to spea

ly bestowing upon herself the sympathy she did not want from me (as I had been told in so many words, if not more plainly in the accompanying brief encounter between our eyes), yet had I re

u it would have been somebody else, and I should have known of it indirectly instead of directly; but

tay much

e such a question only natural, yet it was scarcely as

ts up house alone, which is costlier and far less comfortable. You s

ely your

I did ch

Lascelles, "have wash

scelles-surel

wild; but his crowning act of madness in their eyes was his marriage. It was worse than the worst thing h

ndent in her loneliness, and apparently quite fine-hearted and unspoilt. But for Bob Evers and his mother, the interest that I took might have been a little different in kind; but even with my solicitude for them there mingled already no small consideration for the social solitary whom I watched now as she sat peering across th

s nothing for it but to go through with the thing and make immediate enemies of my friends. So I set my teeth and talked of Bob. I was gl

lles, calling her fine eyes home from in