“Run to the bridge, Wynd,” whispers Naylor.  “He may have thrown himself over.”

“Tally ho!” whispers Wynd in return, laying his hand on Naylor’s arm, and pointing to the left of the road.

A hundred yards from them, over the boggy upland, among scattered boulders, a dark figure is moving.  Now he stops short, gesticulating; turns right and left irresolutely.  At last he hurries on and upward; he is running, springing from stone to stone.

“There is but one thing, Wynd.  After him, or he’ll drown himself in Llyn Cwn Fynnon.”

“No, he’s striking to the right.  Can he be going up the Glyder?”

“We’ll see that in five minutes.  All in the day’s work, my boy.  I could go up Mont Blanc with such a dinner in me.”

The two gallant men run in, struggle into their wet boots again, and provisioned with meat and bread, whiskey, tobacco, and plaids, are away upon Elsley’s tracks, having left Mrs. Owen disconsolate by their announcement, that a sudden fancy to sleep on the Glyder has seized them.  Nothing more will they tell her, or any one; being gentlemen, however much slang they may talk in private.

Elsley left the door of Pen-y-gwryd, careless whither he went, if he went only far enough.

In front of him rose the Glyder Vawr, its head shrouded in soft mist, through which the moonlight gleamed upon the chequered quarries of that enormous desolation, the dead bones of the eldest-born of time.  A wild longing seized him; he would escape up thither; up into those clouds, up anywhere to be alone—­alone with his miserable self.  That was dreadful enough:  but less dreadful than having a companion,—­ay, even a stone by him—­which could remind him of the scene which he had left; even remind him that there was another human being on earth beside himself.  Yes,—­to put that cliff between him and all the world!  Away he plunged from the high road, splashing over boggy uplands, scrambling among scattered boulders, across a stony torrent bed, and then across another and another:—­when would he reach that dark marbled wall, which rose into the infinite blank,—­looking within a stone-throw of him, and yet no nearer after he had walked a mile?

He reached it at last, and rushed up the talus of boulders, springing from stone to stone; till his breath failed him, and he was forced to settle into a less frantic pace.  But upward he would go, and upward he went, with a strength which he never had felt before.  Strong?  How should he not be strong, while every vein felt filled with molten lead; while some unseen power seemed not so much to attract him upwards, as to drive him by magical repulsion from all that he had left below?