“That’s true.  By Jove, I thought I had been roughly used, but it’s nothing to this.  I feel as if I knew your sister, somehow.  I wonder, since you and she are such pals, that you can bear to leave her.”

“She wanted to be alone.  She said she didn’t feel at home in life any more, and it made her restless to be with anyone who knew her trouble, anyone who pitied her.  I was ill too,—­from sympathy, I suppose, and—­she thought a tramp like this would do me good.  So it has.  Being close to nature, especially among mountains, as I’ve been for weeks now, makes one’s troubles and even one’s sister’s troubles seem small.”

“You are young to feel that.”

“My soul isn’t as young as my body.  Maybe that’s why nature is so much to me.  I am more alive when I’m away from big towns.  Sunrises and sunsets are more important than the rising and falling of money markets.  They—­and the wind in the trees.  What things they say to you!  You can’t explain; you can only feel.  And when you have felt, when you have heard colour, and seen sounds, you are never quite the same, quite as sad, again,—­I mean if you have been sad.”

“I’ve said all that—­precisely that—­to myself lately,” I exclaimed, forgetting that I was a man talking to a child.  The strange little person whom I had apostrophised as “Brat” seemed not only an equal, but a superior.  I found myself intensely interested in him, and all that concerned him.  “Odd, that you, too, should have thought that thing about colour and sound!  This evening-blue, for instance.  Do you hear the music of it?”

“Yes.  I’m not sure it isn’t that which has made me answer your questions.  But now let’s talk of something else—­or better still, let’s not talk at all, for a while.”

We were silent, and I wondered if the Boy’s thoughts ran with mine, or if he had closed and locked the secret door in his brain, and listened dreamily to the sweet evening voices of this Valley of Musical Bells.

Suddenly, into the many sounds of the silence, broke a loud and jarring note; the trampling of men’s feet and horses’ hoofs; loud laughter and the jingling of accoutrements.  We looked over the balustrade to see a battalion of soldiers marching at ease, on their way back from some mountain manoeuvres, and as we gazed down, they stared up, a young fellow shouting to the Boy that he had better join them.

“It’s like life calling one back,” said the strange child.  “I suppose one must always go on, somewhere else.  And we—­we must go on, though it is sweet here.”

“It was what I was thinking of just now,” I answered.  “Are we to part company?”

The Boy laughed—­an odd little laugh.  “Why, that depends,” said he abruptly, “on where you are going.  I’ve planned to walk back over the St. Bernard to Martigny, and so by way of the Tete Noire to Chamounix.  That name—­Chamounix—­has always been to my ears, as Stevenson says, ‘like the horns of elf-land, or crimson lake.’  I want to come face to face with Mont Blanc, of which I’ve only seen a far-off mirage, long ago when I was a little chap, at Geneva.  What are your plans?”