“No,” said he, “I can’t see anybody, and I’m very glad I can’t.  It’s about as bad a morning for it as you could possibly have; yet last night was so fine that some fellows might have got up to the hut, and been foolish enough not to come down again.  But have a look for yourself.”

“Oh, thanks,” said I, considerably relieved at what I heard, “but if you can’t see anybody I’m sure I can’t.  You have done it yourself, I daresay?”

The gaunt man smiled demurely, and the keen eyes twinkled in his flayed face.  He was, indeed, a palpable mountaineer.

“What, the Matterhorn?” said he, lowering his voice and looking about him as if on the point of some discreditable admission.  “Oh, yes, I’ve done the Matterhorn, back and front and both sides, with and without guides; but everybody has, in these days.  It’s nothing when you know the ropes and chains and things.  They’ve got everything up there now except an iron staircase.  Still, I should be sorry to tackle it to-day, even if they had a lift!”

“Do you think guides would?” I asked, less reassured than I had felt at first.

“It depends on the guides.  They are not the first to turn back, as a rule; but they like wind and mist even less than we do.  The guides know what wind and mist mean.”

I now understood the special disadvantages of the day and realised the obvious dangers.  I could only hope that either Bob Evers or his guides had shown the one kind of courage required by the occasion, the moral courage of turning back.  But I was not at all sure of Bob.  His stimulus was not that of the single-minded, level-headed mountaineer; in his romantic exaltation he was capable of hailing the very perils as so many more means of grace in the sight of Mrs. Lascelles; yet without doubt he would have repudiated any such incentive, and that in all the sincerity of his simple heart.  He did not know himself as I knew him.

My fears were soon confirmed.  Returning to the glass veranda, after the stock breakfast of the Swiss hotel, with its horseshoe rolls and fabricated honey, I found the telescope the centre of an ominous crowd, on whose fringe hovered my new friend the mountaineer.

“We were wrong,” he muttered to me.  “Some fools are up there, after all.”

“How many?” I asked quickly.

“I don’t know.  There’s no getting near the telescope now, and won’t be till the clouds blot them out altogether.”

I looked out at the Matterhorn.  The loincloth of cloud had shaken itself out into a flowing robe, from which only the brown skull of the mountain protruded in its white skull-cap.

“There are three of them,” announced a nasal voice from the heart of the little crowd.  “A great long chap and two guides.”

“He can’t possibly know that,” remarked the mountaineer to me, “but let’s hope it is so.”

“They’re as plain as pike-staffs,” continued Quinby, whose bent blond head I now distinguished, as he occupied the congenial post of Sister Anne.  “They seem stuck....  No, they’re getting up on to the snow-slope, and the front man’s cutting steps.”