As for the Little Pal and me, we carried out the first part of our programme to the letter.  Two barrel-shaped nags instead of one took us to St. Rhemy, the little mountain village whose men are exempt from conscription, and called, poetically yet literally, “Soldiers of the Snow.”  Further up the jewelled way, our little victoria could not venture, and we trod the steep path side by side, the Boy stepping out bravely, the top of his panama on a level with my ear.

Some magnetic cord of communication between his brain and mine telegraphed back and forth, without personal intervention on either part, my keen enjoyment of the scene, and his.  We did not talk much, but each knew what the other was feeling.  Most people disappoint you by their lack of capacity to enjoy nature, in moments which are superlative to you—­moments which alone would repay you for the whole trouble of living through blank years.  But this boy’s spirit responded to beauty, up to an extreme point which was highly satisfactory.  I saw it in the exaltation on his little sunburned face.

Joseph and Innocentina were ostentatiously delighted to greet us at the Hospice.  They and the animals had had their evening meal, and were ready to start when we wished.  We went to the refectory and dined in company with many persons of many nationalities, who had just arrived from the Swiss and Italian valleys.  Some of them manipulated their food strangely, as I had noticed here before; and Boy confided to me his opinion that it was a pity human beings were still obliged to eat with their mouths, like the lower animals.  “It’s a disgrace to one’s face, which ought to be exclusively for better things.  It’s really too primitive, this penny-in-the-slot sort of arrangement.  There ought to be a tiny trap-door in one’s chest somewhere, so that one could just slip food in unobtrusively, at a meal, and go on talking and laughing as if nothing had happened.”

We were not long in dining, but by the time we came out again into the biting cold, late afternoon had changed to early evening.

It was sunset.  The great mountain shapes of glittering, red gold were clear as the profiles of goddesses, against a sky of rose.  One—­the grandest goddess of all—­wore on her proud head a crown of snow which sparkled with diamond coruscations, rainbow-tinted in the pink light.  Below her golden forehead hovered a thin cloud-veil, of pale lilac; and we had gone a long way down the mountain before the ineffable colour burned to ashes-of-rose.  Then darkness caught and engulfed us, in the Valley of Death.  The rushing of the river in its ravine was like the voice of night, not a separate sound at all, for hearing it was to hear the silence.

By-and-bye we grew conscious of a faint, gradual revealing of the mountain-tops, which for a time had been black, jagged pieces cut out from the spangled fabric of a starry sky.  A ripple of pearly light wavered over them, like the reflection of the unseen river mirrored for the Lady of Shalott.