The girl's golden eyes noted the pretty courtship, and her side glance rested on the little bride to be with an odd, indefinite curiosity, partly interrogative, partly disdainful.
It seemed odd to the girl that in this Alpine solitude life should be encountered at all. And as for life's emotions, the frail, frivolous, ephemeral fury of these white-winged ghosts of daylight, embattled and all tremulous with passion, seemed exquisitely amazing to her here between the chaste and icy immobility of white-veiled peaks and the terrific twilight of the world's depths below.
McKay, studying the papers, glanced up at Miss Erith. A bar of rosy sunset light slanted almost level between them.
"There seems to be," he said slowly, "only one explanation for what you and I read here. The Boche has had his filthy fist on the throat of Switzerland for fifty years."
"And what is 'Les Errues' to which these documents continually refer?" asked the girl.
"Les Errues is the twenty-seventh canton of Switzerland. It is the strip of forest and crag which includes all the northeastern region below Mount Terrible. It is a canton, a secret canton unrepresented in the Federal Assembly--a region without human population--a secret slice of Swiss wilderness OWNED BY GERMANY!"
"Kay, do you believe that?"
"I am sure of it now. It is that wilderness into which I stumbled. It overlooks the terrain in Alsace where for fifty years the Hun has been busy day and night with his sinister, occult operations. Its entrance, if there be any save by the way of avalanches--the way I entered--must be guarded by the Huns; its only exit into Hunland. That is Les Errues. That is the region which masks the Great Secret of the Hun."
He dropped the papers and, clasping his knees in his arms, sat staring out into the infernal blaze of sunset.
"The world," he said slowly, "pays little attention to that agglomeration of cantons called Switzerland. The few among us who know anything about its government might recollect that there are twenty-six cantons--the list begins, Aargau, Appenzell, Ausser-Rhoden, Inner-Rhoden--you may remember--and ends with Valais, Vaud, Zug, and Zurich. And Les Errues is the twenty-seventh canton!"
"Yes," said the girl in a low voice, "the evidence lies at your feet."
"Surely, surely," he muttered, his fixed gaze lost on the crimson celestial conflagration. She said, thinking aloud, and her clear eyes on him: "Then, of the Great Secret, we have learned this much anyway--that there exists in Switzerland a secret canton called Les Errues; that it is practically Hun territory; that it masks what they call their Great Secret; that their ownership or domination of Les Errues is probably a price paid secretly by the Swiss government for its national freedom and that this arrangement is absolutely unknown to anybody in the world outside of the Imperial Hun government and the few Swiss who have inherited, politically, a terrible knowledge of this bargain dating back, probably, from 1870."