In a little while the guide turned his face to the slope and cut upward instead of across.  The slope was so steep that instead of cutting zigzags across its face, he chopped pigeon holes straight up.  They moved from one to the other as on a ladder, and their knees touched the ice as they stood upright in the steps.  For a couple of hours the axes never ceased, and then the leader made two or three extra steps at the side of the staircase.  On to one of them he moved out, Chayne went up and joined him.

“Come, mademoiselle,” he said, and he drew in the rope as Sylvia advanced.  She climbed up level with them on the ladder and waited, not knowing why they stood aside.

“Go on, mademoiselle,” said the guide.  She took another step or two upon snow and uttered a cry.  She had looked suddenly over the top of the mountain on to the Aiguille Verte and the great pile of Mont Blanc, even as Revailloud had told her that she would.  The guide had stood aside that she might be the first to step out upon the summit of the mountain.  She stood upon the narrow ridge of snow, at her feet the rock-cliffs plastered with bulging masses of ice fell sheer to the glacier.

Her first glance was downward to the Col Dolent.  Even at this hour when the basin of the valley was filled with sunshine that one corner at the head of the Glacier d’Argentiere was still dead white, dead black.  She shivered once more as she looked at it—­so grim and so menacing the rock-wall seemed, so hard and steep the riband of ice.  Then Chayne joined her on the ridge.  They sat down and ate their meal and lay for an hour sunning themselves in the clear air.

“You could have had no better day,” said Chayne.

Only a few white scarfs of cloud flitted here and there across the sky and their shadows chased each other across the glittering slopes of ice and snow.  The triangle of the Aiguille Verte was over against her, the beautiful ridges of Les Courtes and Les Droites to her right and beyond them the massive domes and buttresses of the great white mountain.  Sylvia lay upon the eastern slope of the Argentiere looking over the brow, not wanting to speak, and certainly not listening to any word that was uttered.  Her soul was at peace.  The long-continued tension of mind and muscle, the excitement of that last ice-slope, both were over and had brought their reward.  She looked out upon a still and peaceful world, wonderfully bright, wonderfully beautiful, and wonderfully colored.  Here a spire would pierce the sunlight with slabs of red rock interspersed amongst its gray; there ice-cliffs sparkled as though strewn with jewels, bulged out in great green knobs, showed now a grim gray, now a transparent blue.  At times a distant rumble like thunder far away told that the ice-fields were hurling their avalanches down.  Once or twice she heard a great roar near at hand, and Chayne pointing across the valleys would show her what seemed to be a handful