She sat now at the window with no thought of Trouville or their hurried flight.  With each throb of the carriage-wheels the train flashed nearer to Chamonix.  She opened the book which lay upon her lap—­the book in which she had been so interested when Monsieur de Camours and his mother passed her by.  It was a volume of the “Alpine Journal,” more than twenty years old, and she could not open it but some exploit of the pioneers took her eyes, some history of a first ascent of an unclimbed peak.  Such a history she read now.  She was engrossed in it, and yet at times a little frown of annoyance wrinkled her forehead.  She gave an explanation of her annoyance; for once she exclaimed half aloud, “Oh, if only he wouldn’t be so funny!” The author was indeed being very funny, and to her thinking never so funny as when the narrative should have been most engrossing.  She was reading the account of the first ascent of an aiguille in the Chamonix district, held by guides to be impossible and conquered at last by a party of amateurs.  In spite of its humor Sylvia Thesiger was thrilled by it.  She envied the three men who had taken part in that ascent, envied them their courage, their comradeship, their bivouacs in the open air beside glowing fires, on some high shelf of rock above the snows.  But most of all her imagination was touched by the leader of that expedition, the man who sometimes alone, sometimes in company, had made sixteen separate attacks upon that peak.  He stared from the pages of the volume—­Gabriel Strood.  Something of his great reach of limb, of his activity, of his endurance, she was able to realize.  Moreover he had a particular blemish which gave to him a particular interest in her eyes, for it would have deterred most men altogether from his pursuit and it greatly hampered him.  And yet in spite of it, he had apparently for some seasons stood prominent in the Alpine fraternity.  Gabriel Strood was afflicted with a weakness in the muscles of one thigh.  Sylvia, according to her custom, began to picture him, began to talk with him.

She wondered whether he was glad to have reached that summit, or whether he was not on the whole rather sorry—­sorry for having lost out of his life a great and never-flagging interest.  She looked through the subsequent papers in the volume, but could find no further mention of his name.  She perplexed her fancies that morning.  She speculated whether having made this climb he had stopped and climbed no more; or whether he might not get out of this very train on to the platform at Chamonix.  But as the train slowed down near to Annemasse, she remembered that the exploit of which she had read had taken place more than twenty years ago.

CHAPTER II

INTRODUCES ONE OF STROOD’S SUCCESSORS

But though Gabriel Strood occupied no seat in that train, one of his successors was traveling by it to Chamonix after an absence of four years.  Of those four years Captain Chayne had passed the last two among the coal-stacks of Aden, with the yellow land of Arabia at his back, longing each day for this particular morning, and keeping his body lithe and strong against its coming.  He left the train at Annemasse, and crossing the rails to the buffet, sat down at the table next to that which Mrs. Thesiger and her daughter already occupied.