“It would be strange,” said Linforth, “if old Andrew Linforth were still alive.  Somewhere in your country, perhaps in Kohara, waiting for the thing he dreamed to come to pass.  He would be an old man now, but he might still be alive.”

“I wonder,” said Shere Ali absently, and he suddenly turned to Linforth.  “Nothing must come between us,” he cried almost fiercely.  “Nothing to hinder what we shall do together.”

He was the more emotional of the two.  The dreams to which they had given utterance had uplifted him.

“That’s all right,” said Linforth, and he turned back into the hut.  But he remembered afterwards that it was Shere Ali who had protested against the possibility of their association being broken.

They came out from the hut again at half-past three in the morning and looked up to a cloudless starlit sky which faded in the east to the colour of pearl.  Above their heads some knobs of rock stood out upon the thin crest of the buttress against the sky.  In the darkness of a small couloir underneath the knobs Peter was already ascending.  The traverse of the Meije even for an experienced mountaineer is a long day’s climb.  They reached the summit of the Grand Pic in seven hours, descended into the Breche Zsigmondy, climbed up the precipice on the further side of that gap, and reached the Pic Central by two o’clock in the afternoon.  There they rested for an hour, and looked far down to the village of La Grave among the cornfields of the valley.  There was no reason for any hurry.

“We shall reach La Grave by eight,” said Peter, but he was wrong, as they soon discovered.  A slope which should have been soft snow down which they could plunge was hard ice, in which a ladder of steps must be cut before the glacier could be reached.  The glacier itself was crevassed so that many a devour was necessary, and occasionally a jump; and evening came upon them while they were on the Rocher de L’Aigle.  It was quite dark when at last they reached the grass slopes, and still far below them the lights were gleaming in La Grave.  To both men those grass slopes seemed interminable.  The lights of La Grave seemed never to come nearer, never to grow larger.  Little points of fire very far away—­as they had been at first, so they remained.  But for the slope of ground beneath his feet and the aching of his knees, Linforth could almost have believed that they were not descending at all.  He struck a match and looked at his watch and saw that it was after nine; and a little while after they had come to water and taken their fill of it, that it was nearly ten, but now the low thunder of the river in the valley was louder in his ears, and then suddenly he saw that the lights of La Grave were bright and near at hand.

Linforth flung himself down upon the grass, and clasping his hands behind his head, gave himself up to the cool of the night and the stars overhead.

“I could sleep here,” he said.  “Why should we go down to La Grave to-night?”