Page:The Clue of the Twisted Candle (1916).djvu/273

a while she said in a low voice, "Not that way."

"Not what way?" asked T. X. huskily, his spirits doing a little mountaineering.

"The way you mean," she said.

"Oh," said T. X.

He was back again amidst the rosy snows of dawn, was in fact climbing a dizzy escalier on the topmost height of hope's Mont Blanc when she pulled the ladder from under him.

"I shall, of course, never marry," she said with a certain prim decision.

T. X. fell with a dull sickening thud, discovering that his rosy snows were not unlike cold, hard ice in their lack of resilience.

"Who said you would?" he asked somewhat feebly, but in self defence.

"You did," she said, and her audacity took his breath away.

"Well, how am I to help you?" he asked after a while.

"By giving me some advice," she said; "do you think I ought to put the money there?"

"Indeed I do not," said T. X., recovering some