resting on the slope within reach, and which we could hardly avoid touching.  It did not look very secure.  So I put out my hand and just touched it—­quite, quite gently.  But it was so exactly balanced that the least little vibration overset it, and I saw it begin to move, very slowly, as if it meant no harm whatever.  But it was moving, nevertheless, toward me.  My chest was on a level with the top of the cleft, so that I had a good view of the boulder.  I couldn’t do anything at all.  It was much too heavy and big for my arms to stop and I couldn’t move, of course, since I was standing on Jack Lattery’s shoulders.  There did not seem very much chance, with nothing below us except two thousand feet of vacancy.  But there was just at my side a little bit of a crack in the edge of the cleft, and there was just a chance that the rock might shoot out down that cleft past me.  I remember standing and watching the thing sliding down, not in a rush at all, but very smoothly, almost in a friendly sort of way, and I wondered how long it would be before it reached me.  Luckily some irregularity in the slope of rock just twisted it into the crack, and it suddenly shot out into the air at my side with a whizz.  It was so close to me that it cut the cloth of my sleeve.  I had been so fascinated by the gentle movement of the boulder that I had forgotten altogether to tell Lattery what was happening; and when it whizzed out over his head, he was so startled that he nearly lost his balance on the little shelf and we were within an ace of following our rock down to the glacier.  Those were our early days.”  And he laughed with a low deep ring of amusement in his voice.

“We were late that day on the mountain,” he resumed, “and it was dark when we got down to a long snow-slope at its foot.  It was new ground to us.  We were very tired.  We saw it glimmering away below us.  It might end in a crevasse and a glacier for all we knew, and we debated whether we should be prudent or chance it.  We chanced the crevasse.  We sat down and glissaded in the dark with only the vaguest idea where we should end.  Altogether we had very good times, he and I. Well, they have come to an end on the Glacier des Nantillons.”

Chayne became silent; Sylvia Thesiger sat at his side and did not interrupt.  In front of them the pastures slid away into darkness.  Only a few small clear lights shining in the chalets told them there were other people awake in the world.  Except for the reverberation of the torrent deep in the gorge at their right, no sound at all broke the deep silence.  Chayne knocked the ashes from his pipe.

“I beg your pardon,” he said.  “I have been talking to you about one whom you never knew.  You were so quiet that I seemed to be merely remembering to myself.”

“I was so quiet,” Sylvia explained, “because I wished you to go on.  I was very glad to hear you.  It was all new and strange and very pleasant to me—­this story of your friendship.  As strange and pleasant as this cool, quiet night here, a long way from the hotels and the noise, on the edge of the snow.  For I have heard little of such friendships and I have seen still less.”