“By the way,” he said, as he draped her cloak about her shoulders.  “You have that telegram from Jarvice?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good,” he said.  “It might be useful.”

CHAPTER XXII

REVAILLOUD REVISITED

Never that familiar journey across France seemed to Chayne so slow.  Would he be in time?  Would he arrive too late?  The throb of the wheels beat out the questions in a perpetual rhythm and gave him no answer.  The words of Jarvice’s telegram were ever present in his mind, and grew more sinister, the more he thought upon them.  “What are you waiting for?  Hurry up!” Once, when the train stopped over long as it seemed to him he muttered the words aloud and then glanced in alarm at his wife, lest perchance she had overheard them.  But she had not.  She was remembering her former journey along this very road.  Then it had been night; now it was day.  Then she had been used to seek respite from her life in the shelter of her dreams.  Now the dreams were of no use, since what was real made them by comparison so pale and thin.  The blood ran strong and joyous in her veins to-day; and looking at her, Chayne sent up his prayers that they might not arrive in Chamonix too late.  To him as to her Walter Hine was a mere puppet, a thing without importance—­so long as he lived.  But he must live.  Dead, he threatened ruin and dishonor, and since from the beginning Sylvia and he had shared—­for so she would have it—­had shared in the effort to save this life, it would be well for them, he thought that they should not fail.

The long hot day drew to an end, and at last from the platform at the end of the electric train they saw the snow-fields lift toward the soaring peaks, and the peaks purple with the after glow stand solitary and beautiful against the evening sky.

“At last!” said Sylvia, with a catch in her breath, and the clasp of her hand tightened upon her husband’s arm.  But Chayne was remembering certain words once spoken to him in a garden of Dorsetshire, by a man who lay idly in a hammock and stared up between the leaves.  “On the most sunny day, the mountains hold in their recesses mystery and death.”

“You know where your father is staying?” Chayne asked.

“He wrote from the Hotel de l’Arve,” Sylvia replied.

“We will stay at Couttet’s and walk over to see him this evening,” said Chayne, and after dinner they strolled across the little town.  But at the Hotel de l’Arve they found neither Garratt Skinner nor his friend, Walter Hine.

“Only the day before yesterday,” said the proprietor, “they started for the mountains.  Always they make expeditions.”

Chayne drew no satisfaction from that statement.  Garratt Skinner and his friend would make many expeditions from which both men would return in safety.  Garratt Skinner was no blunderer.  And when at the last he returned alone with some flawless story of an accident in which his friend had lost his life, no one would believe but that here was another mishap, and another name to be added to the Alpine death-roll.