Chayne, however, forgot Sylvia Thesiger.  As the train moved on to Le Fayet he was thinking only of the plans which he had made, of the new expeditions which were to be undertaken, of his friend John Lattery and his guide Michel Revailloud who would be waiting for him upon the platform of Chamonix.  He had seen neither of them for four years.  The electric train carried the travelers up from Le Fayet.  The snow-ridges and peaks came into view; the dirt-strewn Glacier des Bossons shot out a tongue of blue ice almost to the edge of the railway track, and a few minutes afterward the train stopped at the platform of Chamonix.

Chayne jumped down from his carriage and at once suffered the first of his disappointments.  Michel Revailloud was on the platform to meet him, but it was a Michel Revailloud whom he hardly knew, a Michel Revailloud grown very old.  Revailloud was only fifty-two years of age, but during Chayne’s absence the hardships of his life had taken their toll of his vigor remorselessly.  Instead of the upright, active figure which Chayne so well remembered, he saw in front of him a little man with bowed shoulders, red-rimmed eyes, and a withered face seamed with tiny wrinkles.

At this moment, however, Michel’s pleasure at once more seeing his old patron gave to him at all events some look of his former alertness, and as the two men shook hands he cried: 

“Monsieur, but I am glad to see you!  You have been too long away from Chamonix.  But you have not changed.  No, you have not changed.”

In his voice there was without doubt a note of wistfulness.  “I would I could say as much for myself.”  That regret was as audible to Chayne as though it had been uttered.  But he closed his ears to it.  He began to talk eagerly of his plans.  There were familiar peaks to be climbed again and some new expeditions to be attempted.

“I thought we might try a new route up the Aiguille sans Nom,” he suggested, and Michel assented but slowly, without the old heartiness and without that light in his face which the suggestion of something new used always to kindle.  But again Chayne shut his ears.

“I was very lucky to find you here,” he went on cheerily.  “I wrote so late that I hardly hoped for it.”

Michel replied with some embarrassment: 

“I do not climb with every one, monsieur.  I hoped perhaps that one of my old patrons would want me.  So I waited.”

Chayne looked round the platform for his friend.

“And Monsieur Lattery?” he asked.

The guide’s face lit up.

“Monsieur Lattery?  Is he coming too?  It will be the old days once more.”

“Coming?  He is here now.  He wrote to me from Zermatt that he would be here.”

Revailloud shook his head.

“He is not in Chamonix, monsieur.”

Chayne experienced his second disappointment that morning, and it quite chilled him.  He had come prepared to walk the heights like a god in the perfection of enjoyment for just six weeks.  And here was his guide grown old; and his friend, the comrade of so many climbs, so many bivouacs above the snow-line, had failed to keep his tryst.