“Yes,” she replied.  “Please say that it will be fine to-morrow!”

“I have never seen an evening of better promise,” returned Chayne, with a smile at her eagerness.  The brown cliffs of the Aiguille du Chardonnet just across the glacier glowed red in the sunlight; and only a wisp of white cloud trailed like a lady’s scarf here and there in the blue of the sky.  The woman of the chalet came out and spoke to him.

“She wants to know when we will dine,” he explained to Sylvia.  “There are only you and I. We should dine early, for you will have to start early”; and he repeated the invariable cry of that year:  “There is so very little snow.  It may take you some time to get off the glacier on to your mountain.  There is always a crevasse to cross.”

“I know,” said Sylvia, with a smile.  “The bergschrund.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Chayne, and in his turn he smiled too.  “Of course you know these terms.  I saw you reading a copy of the ’Alpine Journal.’”

They dined together an hour later with the light of the sunset reddening the whitewashed walls of the little simple room and bathing in glory the hills without.  Sylvia Thesiger could hardly eat for wonder.  Her face was always to the window, her lips were always parted in a smile, her gray eyes bright with happiness.

“I have never known anything like this,” she said.  “It is all so strange, so very beautiful.”

Her freshness and simplicity laid their charm on him, even as they had done on Michel Revailloud the night before.  She was as eager as a child to get the meal done with and to go out again into the open air, before the after-glow had faded from the peaks.  There was something almost pathetic in her desire to make the very most of such rare moments.  Her eagerness so clearly told him that such holidays came but seldom in her life.  He urged her, however, to eat, and when she had done they went out together and sat upon the bench, watching in silence the light upon the peaks change from purple to rose, the rocks grow cold, and the blue of the sky deepen as the night came.

“You too are making an ascent?” she asked.

“No,” he answered.  “I am crossing a pass into Italy.  I am going away from Chamonix altogether.”

Sylvia turned to him; her eyes were gentle with sympathy.

“Yes, I understand that,” she said.  “I am sorry.”

“You said that once before to me, on the steps of the hotel,” said Chayne.  “It was kind of you.  Though I said nothing, I was grateful”; and he was moved to open his heart to her, and to speak of his dead friend.  The darkness gathered about them; he spoke in the curt sentences which men use who shrink from any emotional display; he interrupted himself to light his pipe.  But none the less she understood the reality of his distress.  He told her with a freedom of which he was not himself at the moment quite aware, of a clean, strong friendship which owed nothing to sentiment, which was never fed by protestations, which endured through long intervals, and was established by the memory of great dangers cheerily encountered and overcome.  It had begun amongst the mountains, and surely, she thought, it had retained to the end something of their inspiration.