It was a strange, living light, beating with a visible pulse, and it slowly grew until its white radiance had extinguished the individual lamps of the stars.  Waterfalls flashed out of darkness, like white, laughing nymphs flinging off black masks and dominoes; silver goblets and diamond necklaces were flung into the river bed, and vanished forever with a mystic gleam.

“If there’s a heaven, can there be anything in it better than this, Little Pal?” I asked.

“There can be God,” he said.  “I’m a pagan sometimes in the sun, but never on a night like this.  Then one knows things one isn’t sure of at other times.  Why, I suppose there isn’t really a world at all!  God is simply thinking of these things, and of us, so we and they seem to be.  We are his thoughts; the mountains, and the river, and the wild-flowers are his thoughts.  It’s just as if an author writes a story.  In the story, all the people and the things which concern them are real, but you close the volume and they simply don’t exist.  Only God doesn’t close the volume, I think, until the next is ready.”

“I wonder whether we’ll both come into the next story?”

“Who knows?  Perhaps you’ll wander into one story, and I’ll get lost in another.”

A certain sadness fell upon me, born partly of our talk, partly of the poignant beauty of the night.  We came to the Cantine de Proz, fast asleep in its lonely valley, and so we went on and on, our souls tuned to music and poetry by the song of the stars and the beauty of the night:  But slowly a change stole over us.  For a long time I was only dimly conscious of it, in a puzzled way, in myself.  Why was it that my spirit stood no longer on the heights?  Why did the moonlight look cold and metallic?  Why had the rushing sound of the river got on my nerves, like the monotonous crying of a fretful child?  Why did our frequent silences no longer tingle with a meaning which there was no need to express in words?  Why was my brain empty of impressions as a squeezed sponge of water?  Why, in fact, though everything was outwardly the same, why was all in reality different?

“Oh, Man, I’m so hungry!” sighed Boy.

“By Jove, that’s what’s been the matter with me this last half-hour, and I didn’t know it!” said I.

“I feel as if I could form a hollow square, all by myself.”

“I only wish there were something to form it round.”

“But there isn’t—­except a few chocolate creams I bought in Aosta because I respected their old age, poor things.”

“Perhaps even decrepid chocolates are better than nothing.  Let’s give ’em honourable burial—­unless you want them all to yourself, as you did the chicken at the ‘Dejeuner,’ and the room at the Cantine de Proz.”

“Oh, you must have thought I was selfish!  But truly, I don’t think I am.  It wasn’t that.  Only—­I can’t explain.”

“You needn’t,” said I.  “I was ’kidding’—­a most appropriate treatment for a man of your size.  What I want is food, not explanations.”