is my card.” Helen read, “Mrs. H. de Courcy Vavasour, Villa Menini, Nice.” “I am sorry,” she said, with a friendly smile that might have disarmed prejudice, “but in the hurry of my departure from London I packed my cards in my registered baggage. My name is Helen Wynton.” The eyeglasses went up once more. “Do you spell it with an I? Are you one of the Gloucestershire Wintons?” “No. I live in town; but my home is in Norfolk.” “And whose party will you join at the Maloja?” Helen colored a little under this rigorous heckling. “As I have already told you, Mrs. Vavasour, I am [Pg 70]alone,” she said. “Indeed, I have come here to—to do some literary work.” [Pg 70] “For a newspaper?” “Yes.” Mrs. Vavasour received this statement guardedly. If Helen was on the staff of an important journal there was something to be gained by being cited in her articles as one of the important persons “sojourning” in the Engadine. “It is really wonderful,” she admitted, “how enterprising the great daily papers are nowadays.” Helen, very new to a world of de Courcy Vavasours, and Wraggs, and Burnham-Joneses, forgave this hawklike pertinacity for sake of the apparent sympathy of her catechist. And she was painfully candid. “The weekly paper I represent is not at all well known,” she explained; “but here I am, and I mean to enjoy my visit hugely. It is the chance of a lifetime to be sent abroad on such a mission. I little dreamed a week since that I should be able to visit this beautiful country under the best conditions without giving a thought to the cost.” Poor Helen! Had she delved in many volumes to obtain material that would condemn her in the eyes of the tuft hunter she was addressing, she could not have shocked so many conventions in so few words. She was poor, unknown, unfriended! Worse than these negative defects, she was positively attractive! Mrs.
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