Chayne leaned upon the rail and looked downward.  A long way below him, in the clear darkness of the valley the lights of Chamonix shone bright and very small.  Chayne had never seen them before so straight beneath him.  As he looked he began to notice them; as he noticed them, more and more they took a definite shape.  He rose upright, and pointing downward with one hand he said in a whisper, a whisper of awe—­

“Do you see, Michel?  Do you see?”

The great main thoroughfare ran in a straight line eastward through the town, and, across it, intersecting it at the little square where the guides gather of an evening, lay the other broad straight road from the church across the river.  Along those two roads the lights burned most brightly, and thus there had emerged before Chayne’s eyes a great golden cross.  It grew clearer and clearer as he looked; he looked away and then back again, and now it leapt to view, he could not hide it from his sight, a great cross of light lying upon the dark bosom of the valley.

“Do you see, Michel?”

“Yes.”  The answer came back very steadily.  “But so it was last night and last year.  Those three men on the Plan had it before their eyes all night.  It is no sign of disaster.”  For a moment he was silent, and then he added timidly:  “If you look for a sign, monsieur, there is a better one.”

Chayne turned toward Michel in the darkness rather quickly.

“As we set out from the hotel,” Michel continued, “there was a young girl upon the steps with a very sweet and gentle face.  She spoke to you, monsieur.  No doubt she told you that her prayers would be with you to-night.”

“No, Michel,” Chayne replied, and though the darkness hid his face, Michel knew that he smiled.  “She did not promise me her prayers.  She simply said:  ‘I am sorry.’”

Michel Revailloud was silent for a little while, and when he spoke again, he spoke very wistfully.  One might almost have said that there was a note of envy in his voice.

“Well, that is still something, monsieur.  You are very lonely to-night, is it not so?  You came back here after many years, eager with hopes and plans and not thinking at all of disappointments.  And the disappointments have come, and the hopes are all fallen.  Is not that so, too?  Well, it is something, monsieur—­I, who am lonely too, and an old man besides, so that I cannot mend my loneliness, I tell you—­it is something that there is a young girl down there with a sweet and gentle face who is sorry for you, who perhaps is looking up from among those lights to where we stand in the darkness at this moment.”

But it seemed that Chayne did not hear, or, if he heard, that he paid no heed.  And Michel, knocking the tobacco from his pipe, said: 

“You will do well to sleep.  We may have a long day before us”; and he walked away to the guides’ quarters.