He leaped to his feet, and I to mine.

“Lead on, Camille.  I follow.”

He called to the leader of his flock:  “Petitjean! stray not, my little one.  I shall be back sooner than the daisies close.”  Then he turned to me again.  I noticed a pallid, desperate look in his face, as though he were strung to great effort; but it was the face of a mindless one still.

“Do you not fear?” he said, in a whisper; and the apple in his throat seemed all choking core.

“I fear nothing,” I answered with a smile; yet the still sombreness of the woods found a little tremor in my breast.

“It is good,” he answered, regarding me.  “The angel spoke truth.  Follow, Monsieur.”

He went off through the trees of a sudden, and I had much ado to keep pace with him.  He ran as one urged on by a sure sense of doom, looking neither to right nor left.  His mountain instincts had remained with him when memory itself had closed around like a fog, leaving him face to face and isolated with his one unconfessed point of terror.  Swiftly we made our way, ever slightly climbing, along the rugged hillside, and soon broke into country very wild and dismal.  The pastoral character of the scene lessened and altogether disappeared.  The trees grew matted and grotesquely gnarled, huddling together in menacing battalions—­save where some plunging rock had burst like a shell, forcing a clearing and strewing the black moss with a jagged wreck of splinters.  Here no flowers crept for warmth, no sentinel marmot turned his little scut with a whistle of alarm to vanish like a red shadow.  All was melancholy and silence and the massed defiance of ever-impending ruin.  Storm, and avalanche, and the bitter snap of frost had wrought their havoc year by year, till an uncrippled branch was a rare distinction.  The very saplings, of stunted growth, bore the air of thieves reared in a rookery of crime.

We strode with difficulty in an inhuman twilight through this great dark quickset of Nature, and had paused a moment where the thronging trunks thinned somewhat, when a little mouthing moan came towards us on the crest of a ripple of wind.  My companion stopped on the instant, and clutched my arm, his face twisting with panic.

“The Cascade, Monsieur!” he shook out in a terrified whisper.

“Courage, my friend!  It is that we come to seek.”

“Ah!  My God, yes—­it is that!  I dare not—­I dare not!”

He drew back livid with fear, but I urged him on.

“Remember the dream, Camille!” I cried.

“Yes, yes—­it was good.  Help me, Monsieur, and I will try—­yes, I will try!”

I drew his arm within mine, and together we stumbled on.  The undergrowth grew denser and more fantastic; the murmur filled out, increased and resolved itself into a sound of falling water that ever took shape, and volume, and depth, till its crash shook the ground at our feet.  Then in a moment a white blaze of sky came at us through the trunks, and we burst through the fringe of the wood to find ourselves facing the opposite side of a long cleft in the mountain and the blade’s edge of a roaring cataract.