“Still there’s a chance that I may find him,” he pleaded, and crossing Piccadilly passed into Dover Street.  Half way along the street of milliners, he stopped before a house where a famous scholar had his lodging.

“Is Mr. Kenyon in London?” he asked, and the man-servant replied to his great relief: 

“Yes, sir, but he is not yet at home.”

“I will wait for him,” said Chayne.

He was shown into the study and left there with a lighted lamp.  The room was lined with books from floor to ceiling.  Chayne mounted a ladder and took down from a high corner some volumes bound simply in brown cloth.  They were volumes of the “Alpine Journal.”  He had chosen those which dated back from twenty years to a quarter of a century.  He drew a chair up beside the lamp and began eagerly to turn over the pages.  Often he stopped, for the name of which he was in search often leaped to his eyes from the pages.  Chayne read of the exploits in the Alps of Gabriel Strood.  More than one new expedition was described, many variations of old ascents, many climbs already familiar.  It was clear that the man was of the true brotherhood.  A new climb was very well, but the old were as good to Gabriel Strood, and the climb which he had once made he had the longing to repeat with new companions.  None of the descriptions were written by Strood himself but all by companions whom he had led, and most of them bore testimony to an unusual endurance, an unusual courage, as though Strood triumphed perpetually over a difficulty which his companions did not share and of which only vague hints were given.  At last Chayne came to that very narrative which Sylvia had been reading on her way to Chamonix—­and there the truth was bluntly told for the first time.

Chayne started up in that dim and quiet room, thrilled.  He had the proof now, under his finger—­the indisputable proof.  Gabriel Strood suffered from an affection of the muscles in his right thigh, and yet managed to out-distance all his rivals.  Hine’s words drummed in Chayne’s ears: 

“Nevertheless he left us all behind.”

Garratt Skinner:  Gabriel Strood.  Surely, surely!  He replaced the volumes and took others down.  In the first which he opened—­it was the autumn number of nineteen years ago—­there was again mention of the man; and the climb described was the ascent of Mont Blanc from the Brenva Glacier.  Chayne leaned back in his chair fairly startled by this confirmation.  It was to the Brenva route that Garratt Skinner had continually harked back.  The Aiguille Verte, the Grandes Jorasses, the Charmoz, the Blaitiere—­yes, he had talked of them all, but ever he had come back, with an eager voice and a fire in his eyes, to the ice-arete of the Brenva route.  Chayne searched on through the pages.  But there was nowhere in any volume on which he laid his hands any further record of his exploits.  Others who followed in his steps mentioned his name, but of the man himself there was no word more.  No one had climbed with him, no one had caught a glimpse of him above the snow-line.  For five or six seasons he had flashed through the Alps.  Arolla, Zermatt, the Montanvert, the Concordia hut—­all had known him for five or six seasons, and then just under twenty years ago he had come no more.