“This is our way” said Jean.  “We ascend by the rocks at the side.”

They breakfasted again and began to ascend the rocks to the left of the great gully, Sylvia following second behind her leading guide.  The rocks were not difficult, but they were very steep and at times loose.  Moreover, Jean climbed fast and Sylvia had much ado to keep pace with him.  But she would not call on him to slacken his pace, and she was most anxious not to come up on the rope but to climb with her own hands and feet.  This they ascended for the better part of an hour and Jean halted on a convenient ledge.  Sylvia had time to look down.  She had climbed with her face to the wall of rock, her eyes searching quickly for her holds, fixing her feet securely, gripping firmly with her hands, avoiding the loose boulders.  Moreover, the rope had worried her.  When she had left it at its length between herself and the guide in front of her, it would hang about her feet, threatening to trip her, or catch as though in active malice in any crack which happened to be handy.  If she shortened it and held it in her hands, there would come a sudden tug from above as the leader raised himself from one ledge to another which almost overset her.

Now, however, flushed with her exertion and glad to draw her breath at her ease, she looked down and was astonished.  So far below her already seemed the glacier she had left, so steep the rocks up which she had climbed.

“You are not tired?” said Chayne.

Sylvia laughed.  Tired, when a dream was growing real, when she was actually on the mountain face!  She turned her face again to the rock-wall and in a little more than an hour after leaving the foot of the gully she stepped out on to a patch of snow on the shoulder of the mountain.  She stood in sunlight, and all the country to the east was suddenly unrolled before her eyes.  A moment before and her face was to the rock, now at her feet the steep snow-slopes dropped to the Glacier of Saleinaz.  The crags of the Aiguille Dorees, and some green uplands gave color to the glittering world of ice, and far away towered the white peaks of the Grand Combin and the Weisshorn in a blue cloudless sky, and to the left over the summit of the Grande Fourche she saw the huge embattlements of the Oberland.  She stood absorbed while the rest of the party ascended to her side.  She hardly knew indeed that they were there until Chayne standing by her asked: 

“You are not disappointed?”

She made no reply.  She had no words wherewith to express the emotion which troubled her to the depths.

They rested for a while on this level patch of snow.  To their right the ridge ran sharply up to the summit.  But not by that ridge was the summit to be reached.  They turned over on to the eastern face of the mountain and traversed in a straight line across the great snow-slope which sweeps down in one white unbroken curtain toward the Glacier of Saleinaz.  Their order had been changed.  First Jean advanced.  Chayne followed and after him came Sylvia.