“Did you sleep?” he asked.

“I was too excited,” she answered.  “But I am not tired”; and certainly there was no trace of fatigue in her appearance.

They started at half past one and went up behind the hut.

The stars shimmered overhead in a dark and cloudless sky.  The night was still; as yet there was no sign of dawn.  The great rock cliffs of the Chardonnet across the glacier and the towering ice-slopes of the Aiguille Verte beneath which they passed were all hidden in darkness.  They might have been walking on some desolate plain of stones flat from horizon to horizon.  They walked in single file, Jean leading with a lighted lantern in his hand, so that Sylvia, who followed next, might pick her way amongst the boulders.  Thus they marched for two hours along the left bank of the glacier and then descended on to ice.  They went forward partly on moraine, partly on ice at the foot of the crags of the Aiguille Verte.  And gradually the darkness thinned.  Dim masses of black rock began to loom high overhead, and to all seeming very far away.  The sky paled, the dim masses of rock drew near about the climbers, and over the steep walls, the light flowed into the white basin of the glacier as though from every quarter of the sky.

Sylvia stopped and Chayne came up with her.

“Well?” he asked; and as he saw her face his thoughts were suddenly swept back to the morning when the beauty of the ice-world was for the first time vouchsafed to him.  He seemed to recapture the fine emotion of that moment.

Sylvia stood gazing with parted lips up that wide and level glacier to its rock-embattled head.  The majestic silence of the place astounded her.  There was no whisper of wind, no rustling of trees, no sound of any bird.  As yet too there was no crack of ice, no roar of falling stones.  And as the silence surprised her ears, so the simplicity of color smote upon her eyes.  There were no gradations.  White ice filled the basin and reached high into the recesses of the mountains, hanging in rugged glaciers upon their flanks, and streaking the gullies with smooth narrow ribands.  And about the ice, and above it, circling it in, black walls of rock towered high, astonishingly steep and broken at the top into pinnacles of an exquisite beauty.

“I shall be very glad to have seen this,” said Sylvia, as she stored the picture in her mind, “more glad than I am even now.  It will be a good memory to fall back upon when things are troublesome.”

“Must things be troublesome?” he asked.

“Don’t let me spoil my one day,” she said, with a smile.

She moved on, and Chayne, falling back, spoke for a little with his guides.  A little further on Jean stopped.

“That is our mountain, mademoiselle,” he said, pointing eastward across the glacier.

Sylvia turned in that direction.

Straight in front of her a bay of ice ran back, sloping ever upward, and around the bay there rose a steep wall of cliffs which in the center sharpened precipitously to an apex.  The apex was not a point but a rounded level ridge of snow which curved over on the top of the cliffs like a billow of foam.  A tiny black tower of rock stood alone on the northern end of the snow-ridge.