The Queen of Sheba, and My Cousin the Colonel

Lynde passed his arm through Flemming's, and the two friends mounted the staircase of the hotel.

"How is it you are in Geneva?" repeated Lynde.

"By luck," answered Flemming. "I am going home—in a zigzag way. I've been obliged to take a reef in my Eastern itinerary. The fact is, I have had a letter from the old gentleman rather suggesting it. I believe he has availed himself of my absence to fall into financial difficulties."

"Why, I thought he was rolling in wealth."

"No, he is rolling in poverty, as nearly as I can make out. Well, not so bad as that. Nothing is ever as bad as it pretends to be. But he has met with heavy losses. I shall find letters in London and learn all about it. He wrote me not to hurry, that a month or two would make no difference. When I got to Munich I thought I would take a peep at Switzerland while I had the opportunity. I have done a good piece—from Lindau to Lucerne, from Lucerne to Martigny by way of the Furca; through the Tete Noire Pass to Chamouni, and from Chamouni, here."

While Flemming was speaking, Lynde unlocked a door at the end of the hall and ushered him into a sitting-room with three windows, each opening upon a narrow balcony of its own.

"Sit there, old fellow," said Lynde, wheeling an easy-chair to the middle window, "and look through my glass at the view before it takes itself off. It is not often as fine as it is this evening."

In front of the hotel the blue waters of the Rhone swept under the arches of the Pont des Bergues, to lose themselves in the turbid, glacier-born Arve, a mile below the town. Between the Pont des Bergues and the Pont du Montblanc lay the island of Jean Jacques Rousseau, linked to the quay by a tiny chain bridge. Opposite, upon the right bank of the Rhone, stretched the handsome facades of tile-roofed buildings, giving one an idea of the ancient quarter which a closer inspection dispels; for the streets are crooked and steep, and the houses, except those lining the quays, squalid. It was not there, however, that the eye would have lingered. Far away, seen an incredible distance in the transparent evening atmosphere, Mont Blanc and its massed group of snowy satellites lifted themselves into the clouds. All those luminous battlements and turrets and pyramids—the Mole, the Grandes Jorasses, the Aiguilles du Midi, the Dent du Geant, the Aiguilles d'Argentiere—were now suffused with a glow so magically delicate that the softest tint of the blush rose would have seemed harsh and crude in comparison.

"You have to come away from Mont Blanc to see it," said Flemming, lowering the glass. "When I had my nose against it at Chamouni I didn't see it at all. It overhung me and smothered me. Old boy"—reaching up his hand to Lynde who was leaning on the back of the chair—"who would ever have thought that we two"—Flemming stopped short and looked earnestly into his comrade's face. "Why, Ned, I didn't notice how thin and pale you are. Are you ill?"

The color which had mantled Lynde's cheeks in the first surprise and pleasure of meeting his friend had passed away, leaving, indeed, a somewhat haggard expression on the young man's countenance.

"Ill? Not that I know."

"Is anything wrong?"

"There is nothing wrong," replied Lynde, with some constraint. "That is to say, nothing very wrong. For a month or six weeks I have been occupied with a matter that has rather unsettled me—more, perhaps, than I ought to have allowed."

"What is that?"

"It doesn't signify. Don't let's speak of it."

"But it does signify. You are keeping something serious from me. Out with it."

"Well, the truth is," said Lynde after a moment's hesitation, "it IS something serious and nothing very positive: that's the perplexing part of it."

"You are not making it clear to me."

"I don't know that I can, Flemming."

"Try, then."

Lynde reflected a few seconds, with his eyes fixed on the remote mountain lines imperceptibly melting into the twilight. "Do you remember our walk home from the theatre, one night, two or three days before you sailed from New York?"

"Perfectly," replied Flemming.

"Do you recollect my telling you of a queer thing that happened to me up in the New Hampshire hills?"

"Your encounter with the little lunatic? Perfectly."

"Don't!" said Lynde, shrinking as if some sharp instrument had pierced him. "She is here!"

"Here!" exclaimed Flemming, half rising from the chair, and glancing towards a draped door which connected the suite of apartments.

"Not in these rooms," said Lynde, with a short laugh, "but in

Geneva—in this hotel."

"You do not mean it."

"When I say it is she, I'm not sure of it."

"Of course it isn't."

"That's what I say, and the next moment I know it is."

"And is THIS your trouble?"

"Yes," answered Lynde, knitting his brows. "I felt that I shouldn't make it clear to you."

"I am afraid you haven't, Ned. What earthly difference does it make to you whether or not it's the same girl?"

"What difference!" cried Lynde impetuously; "what difference—when I love the very ground she walks on!"

"Oh, you love her! Which one?"

"Don't laugh at me, Flemming."

"I am not laughing," said Flemming, looking puzzled and anxious. "It is not possible, Ned, you have allowed yourself to go and get interested in a—a person not right in her mind!"

"Miss Denham is as sane as you are."

"Then Miss—Denham, is it?—cannot be the girl you told me about."

"That's the point."

"I don't see why there should be any confusion on that point."

"Don't you?"

"Come, let us go to the bottom of this. You have fallen in with a woman in Switzerland, and you suspect her of being a girl you met years ago in New Hampshire under circumstances which render her appearance here nearly an impossibility. As I am not a man of vivid imagination, that floors me. What makes you think them identical?"

"A startling personal resemblance, age, inflection of voice, manner, even a certain physical peculiarity—a scar."

"Then what makes you doubt?"

"Everything."

"Well, that's comprehensive, at all events."

"The very fact of her being here. The physician at the asylum said that that girl's malady was hopeless. Miss Denham has one of the clearest intellects I ever knew; she is a linguist, an accomplished musician, and, what is more rare, a girl who has moved a great deal in society, or, at least, has travelled a great deal, and has not ceased to be an unaffected, fresh, candid girl."