Meanwhile Michel Revailloud walked slowly down the street, stopping to speak with any one he knew however slightly, that he might defer his entrance into the dark and empty cottage at Les Praz-Conduits.  He drew near to the hotel where Chayne was staying and saw under the lamp above the door a guide whom he knew talking with a young girl.  The young girl raised her head.  It was she who had said, “I am sorry.”  As Michel came within the circle of light she recognized him.  She spoke quickly to the guide and he turned at once and called “Michel,” and when Revailloud approached, he presented him to Sylvia Thesiger.  “He has made many first ascents in the range of Mont Blanc, mademoiselle.”

Sylvia held out her hand with a smile of admiration.

“I know,” she said.  “I have read of them.”

“Really?” cried Michel.  “You have read of them—­you, mademoiselle?”

There was as much pleasure as wonder in his tone.  After all, flattery from the lips of a woman young and beautiful was not to be despised, he thought, the more especially when the flattery was so very well deserved.  Life had perhaps one or two compensations to offer him in his old age.

“Yes, indeed.  I am very glad to meet you, Michel.  I have known your name a long while and envied you for living in the days when these mountains were unknown.”

Revailloud forgot the mules to the Montanvert and the tourists on the Mer de Glace.  He warmed into cheerfulness.  This young girl looked at him with so frank an envy.

“Yes, those were great days, mademoiselle,” he said, with a thrill of pride in his voice.  “But if we love the mountains, the first ascent or the hundredth—­there is just the same joy when you feel the rough rock beneath your fingers or the snow crisp under your feet.  Perhaps mademoiselle herself will some time—­”

At once Sylvia interrupted him with an eager happiness—­

“Yes, to-morrow,” she said.

“Oho!  It is your first mountain, mademoiselle?”

“Yes.”

“And Jean here is your guide.  Jean and his brother, I suppose?” Michel laid his hand affectionately on the guide’s shoulder.  “You could not do better, mademoiselle.”

He looked at her thoughtfully for a little while.  She was fresh—­fresh as the smell of the earth in spring after a fall of rain.  Her eyes, the alertness of her face, the eager tones of her voice, were irresistible to him, an old tired man.  How much more irresistible then to a younger man.  Her buoyancy would lift such an one clear above his melancholy, though it were deep as the sea.  He himself, Michel Revailloud, felt twice the fellow he had been when he sat in the balcony above the Arve.

“And what mountain is it to be, mademoiselle?” he asked.

The girl took a step from the door of the hotel and looked upward.  To the south, but quite close, the long thin ridge of the Aiguille des Charmoz towered jagged and black against the starlit sky.  On one pinnacle of that ridge a slab of stone was poised like the top of a round table on the slant.  It was at that particular pinnacle that Sylvia looked.