The Golden Peaks Read Online Free PDF Page A

down the outside staircase and along the rough mountain road, chiding herself bitterly for putting this extra strain on herself.
    She reached the Rotihorn out of breath. She went in by the back way, and hurried along the corridor. As she turned a corner , she collided with a man coming in the opposite direction. As she drew aside, apol o gizing hastily, she realized, with a little shock, that it. was the man who had reprimanded her for her carelessness on the mountain.
    She stood still in surprise. She was breathing rapidly.
    “What, still running?” asked the man, with a smile that was very faintly derisive.
    “I am a little late,” she said, so surprised to find this man of the mountain here in immaculate evening dress, looking the same and yet so different, that she had no idea what she was saying. Then the sense of the words came to her, and with a murmured excuse, she went to the stairs and ran up them to change. As she did so, the surprising fact that this man was in the hotel kept recurring to her. She had thought he might be a mountain guide, but now she doubted it . She had thought he probably lived in the village. Well, why not? she asked herself. Perhaps he lives in the valley and has come up here to have dinner with a friend.
    She tried to put him out of her mind. She must hurry. She put on her uniform. This evening uniform of the waitresses varied from the black dress with Swiss lace collar worn all day. For evening, they wore black skirts and white blouses, with small embroidered white aprons. These blouses were so beautiful, so fine and elegant, that many of the guests had nothing to compare with them. They were hand embroidered in the traditional manner, or made with hand-made Swiss lace; and were supplied to Kurt St Pierre at a greatly reduced charge, for the advertisement.
    And it was certain that many of the visitors, after seeing th e m, went straight off to the shop in the town, to buy. Celia adjusted her black skirt and little white apron, and, regarding her reflection in the mirror, thought that she looked little like a waitress, with her auburn hair cut short in curling tendrils. It looked rather expensive and useless, an d perhaps she ought to let it grow. She combed it hurriedly, and went downstairs to the dining room; but although she looked among the guests for the tanned face and keen dark eyes of the man she had lately met h e was not to be found.
    She saw Geoffrey Crindle at his table, and he gave her a smil e and a brief salute. Most of her own tables were not yet occupied, but at one of them sat four young Danish students waiting to be served. These four were high-spirited young men who always tried to detain Celia to practise their very halting English with her. This evening, she brought them their soup, and later their main course. She had already served an elderly woman sitting alone, and her other tables were still unoccupied, so she stood at the table of the four young men answering their questions, h olding the large empty dish with one hand, and leaning upon a chair back with the other. They made several amusing mistakes, and Celia laughed gaily with them; and when she turned to go back to the kitchen they would have kept her still longer. Then she saw that three guests had arrived while she had been talking, and seated themselves at their table. She was hurrying towards them when she suddenly saw, once more, the man she had met on the mountain. He was standing at the entrance to the dining room, looking straight across the tables towards Celia, and there was no doubting the fact that he was very angry.
    His face was set in most forbidding lines, and it seemed to her that his dark eyes were burning. Momentarily, she stared back at him, wondering why he should look so angrily towards her, but with people waiting for their dinner, she had no time to think about it now. When she walked back towards the kitchen, he had disappeared, and did not appear again in the dining room, all the