The very resignation of Michel’s voice brought Chayne to a yet deeper compunction.  The wistful melody still throbbed high and sank, and soared again above the murmurs of the passers-by and floated away upon the clear hot starlit night.  Chayne wondered with what words it spoke to his old guide.  He looked at the tired sad face on which a smile of friendliness now played, and his heart ached.  He felt some shame that his own troubles had so engrossed him.  After all, Lattery was not greatly to be pitied.  That was true.  He himself too was young.  There would come other summers, other friends.  The real irreparable trouble sat there before him on the other side of the iron table, the trouble of an old age to be lived out in loneliness.

“You never married, Michel?” he said.

“No.  There was a time, long ago, when I would have liked to,” the guide answered, simply.  “But I think now it was as well that I did not get my way.  She was very extravagant.  She would have needed much money, and guides are poor people, monsieur—­not like your professional cricketers,” he said, with a laugh.  And then he turned toward the massive wall of mountains.  Here and there a slim rock spire, the Dru or the Charmoz, pointed a finger to the stars, here and there an ice-field glimmered like a white mist held in a fold of the hills.  But to Michel Revailloud, the whole vast range was spread out as on a raised map, buttress and peak, and dome of snow from the Aiguille d’Argentiere in the east to the summit of Mont Blanc in the west.  In his thoughts he turned from mountain to mountain and found each one, majestic and beautiful, dear as a living friend, and hallowed with recollections.  He remembered days when they had called, and not in vain, for courage and endurance, days of blinding snow-storms and bitter winds which had caught him half-way up some ice-glazed precipice of rock or on some long steep ice-slope crusted dangerously with thin snow into which the ax must cut deep hour after hour, however frozen the fingers, or tired the limbs.  He recalled the thrill of joy with which, after many vain attempts, he, the first of men, had stepped on to the small topmost pinnacle of this or that new peak.  He recalled the days of travel, the long glacier walks on the high level from Chamonix to Zermatt, and from Zermatt again to the Oberland; the still clear mornings and the pink flush upon some high white cone which told that somewhere the sun had risen; and the unknown ridges where expected difficulties suddenly vanished at the climber’s approach, and others where an easy scramble suddenly turned into the most difficult of climbs.  Michel raised his glass in the air.  “Here is good-by to you—­the long good-by,” he said, and his voice broke.  And abruptly he turned to Chayne with his eyes full of tears and began to speak in a quick passionate whisper, while the veins stood out upon his forehead and his face quivered.

“Monsieur, I told you your friend was not greatly to be pitied.  I tell you now something more.  The guide we brought down with him from the Glacier des Nantillons a fortnight back—­all this fortnight I have been envying him—­yes, yes, even though he kicked the snow with his feet for a little before he died.  It is better to do so than to lead mules up to the Montanvert.”