Chayne’s thoughts were suddenly turned from his dead friend to this, the living companion at his side.  There was something rather sad and pitiful in the tone of her voice, no less than in the words she used.  She spoke with so much humility.  He was aware with a kind of shock, that here was a woman, not a child.  He turned his eyes to her, as he had turned his thoughts.  He could see dimly the profile of her face.  It was still as the night itself.  She was looking straight in front of her into the darkness.  He pondered upon her life and how she bore with it, and how she had kept herself unspoiled by its associations.  Of the saving grace of her dreams he knew nothing.  But the picture of her mother was vivid to his eyes, the outlawed mother, shunned instinctively by the women, noisy and shrill, and making her companions of the would-be fashionable loiterers and the half-pay officers run to seed.  That she bore it ill her last words had shown him.  They had thrown a stray ray of light upon a dark place which seemed a place of not much happiness.

“I am very glad that you are here to-night,” he said.  “It has been kind of you to listen.  I rather dreaded this evening.”

Though what he said was true, it was half from pity that he said it.  He wished her to feel her value.  And in reply she gave him yet another glimpse into the dark place.

“Your friend,” she said, “must have been much loved in Chamonix.”

“Why?”

“So many guides came of their own accord to search for him.”

Again Chayne’s face was turned quickly toward her.  Here indeed was a sign of the people amongst whom she lived, and of their unillumined thoughts.  There must be the personal reason always, the personal reason or money.  Outside of these, there were no motives.  He answered her gently: 

“No; I think that was not the reason.  How shall I put it to you?” He leaned forward with his elbows upon his knees, and spoke slowly, choosing his words.  “I think these guides obeyed a law, a law not of any man’s making, and the one law last broken—­the law that what you know, that you must do, if by doing it you can save a life.  I should think nine medals out of ten given by the Humane Society are given because of the compulsion of that law.  If you can swim, sail a boat, or climb a mountain, and the moment comes when a life can only be saved if you use your knowledge—­well, you have got to use it.  That’s the law.  Very often, I have no doubt, it’s quite reluctantly obeyed, in most cases I think it’s obeyed by instinct, without consideration of the consequences.  But it is obeyed, and the guides obeyed it when so many of them came with me on to the Glacier des Nantillons.”

He heard the girl at his side draw in a sharp breath.  She shivered.

“You are cold?”

“No,” she answered.  “But that, too, is all strange to me.  I should have known of that law without the need to be told of it.  But I shall not forget it.”