“We first met in the Tyrol, eight years ago.  I had crossed a mountain with a guide—­the Glockturm—­and came down in the evening to the Radurschal Thal where I had heard there was an inn.  The evening had turned to rain; but from a shoulder of the mountain I had been able to look right down the valley and had seen one long low building about four miles from the foot of the glacier.  I walked through the pastures toward it, and found sitting outside the door in the rain the man who was to be my friend.  The door was locked, and there was no one about the house, nor was there any other house within miles.  My guide, however, went on.  Lattery and I sat out there in the rain for a couple of hours, and then an old woman with a big umbrella held above her head came down from the upper pastures, driving some cows in front of her.  She told us that no one had stayed at her inn for fourteen years.  But she opened her door, lit us a great fire, and cooked us eggs and made us coffee.  I remember that night as clearly as if it were yesterday.  We sat in front of the fire with the bedding and the mattresses airing behind us until late into the night.  The rain got worse too.  There was a hole in the thatch overhead, and through it I saw the lightning slash the sky, as I lay in bed.  Very few people ever came up or down that valley; and the next morning, after the storm, the chamois were close about the inn, on the grass.  We went on together.  That was the beginning.”

He spoke simply, with a deep quietude of voice.  The tobacco glowed and grew dull in the bowl of his pipe regularly; the darkness hid his face.  But the tenderness, almost the amusement with which he dwelt on the little insignificant details of that first meeting showed her how very near to him it was at this moment.

“We went from the Tyrol down to Verona and baked ourselves in the sun there for a day, under the colonnades, and then came back through the St. Gotthard to Goeschenen.  Do you know the Goeschenen Thal?  There is a semicircle of mountains, the Winterbergen, which closes it in at the head.  We climbed there together for a week, just he and I and no guides.  I remember a rock-ridge there.  It was barred by a pinnacle which stood up from it—­’a gendarme,’ as they call it.  We had to leave the arete and work out along the face of the pinnacle at right angles to the mountain.  There was a little ledge.  You could look down between your feet quite straight to the glacier, two thousand feet below.  We came to a place where the wall of the pinnacle seemed possible.  Almost ten feet above us, there was a flaw in the rock which elsewhere was quite perpendicular.  I was the lightest.  So my friend planted himself as firmly as he could on the ledge with his hands flat against the rock face.  There wasn’t any handhold, you see, and I climbed out on to his back and stood upon his shoulders.  I saw that the rock sloped back from the flaw or cleft in quite a practicable way.  Only there was a big boulder