“No, monsieur, I bring my mule,” said Revailloud, with a smile, and he helped Sylvia to mount it.  “To lead mules to the Montanvert—­is not that my business?  Simond has a rope,” he added, as he saw Chayne sling a coil across his shoulder.

“We may need an extra one,” said Chayne, and the party moved off upon its long march.  At the Montanvert hotel, on the edge of the Mer de Glace, Sylvia descended from her mule, and at once the party went down on to the ice.

“Au revoir!” shouted Michel from above, and he stood and watched them, until they passed out of his sight.  Sylvia turned and waved her hand to him.  But he made no answering sign.  For his eyes were no longer good.

“He is very kind,” said Sylvia.  “He understood that there was some trouble, and while he led the mule he sought to comfort me,” and then between a laugh and a sob she added:  “You will never guess how.  He offered to give me his little book with all the signatures—­the little book which means so much to him.”

It was the one thing which he had to offer her, as Sylvia understood, and always thereafter she remembered him with a particular tenderness.  He had been a good friend to her, asking nothing and giving what he had.  She saw him often in the times which were to come, but when she thought of him, she pictured him as on that early morning standing on the bluff of cliff by the Montanvert with the reins of his mule thrown across his arm, and straining his old eyes to hold his friends in view.

Later during that day amongst the seracs of the Col du Geant, Simond uttered a shout, and a party of guides returning to Chamonix changed their course toward him.  Droz was amongst the number, and consenting at once to the expedition which was proposed to him, he tied himself on to the rope.

“Do you know the Brenva ascent?” Chayne asked of him.

“Yes, monsieur.  I have crossed Mont Blanc once that way.  I shall be very glad to go again.  We shall be the first to cross for two years.  If only the weather holds.”

“Do you doubt that?” asked Chayne, anxiously.  The morning had broken clear, the day was sunny and cloudless.

“I think there may be wind to-morrow,” he replied, raising his face and judging by signs unappreciable to other than the trained eyes of a guide.  “But we will try, eh, monsieur?” he cried, recovering his spirits.  “We will try.  We will be the first on the Brenva ridge for two years.”

But there Chayne knew him to be wrong.  There was another party somewhere on the great ridge at this moment.  “Had it happened?” he asked himself.  “How was it to happen?” What kind of an accident was it to be which could take place with a guide however worthless, and which would leave no suspicion resting on Garratt Skinner?  There would be no cutting of the rope.  Of that he felt sure.  That method might do very well for a melodrama, but actually—­no!  Garratt Skinner would have a better plan than that.  And