Then Rowland admitted that he was nervous.  Neither Mrs. Hudson nor Miss Garland had left their apartment; Rowland had a mental vision of them sitting there praying and listening; he had no desire to see them more directly.  There were a couple of men who hung about the inn as guides for the ascent of the Titlis; Rowland sent each of them forth in a different direction, to ask the news of Roderick at every chalet door within a morning’s walk.  Then he called Sam Singleton, whose peregrinations had made him an excellent mountaineer, and whose zeal and sympathy were now unbounded, and the two started together on a voyage of research.  By the time they had lost sight of the inn, Rowland was obliged to confess that, decidedly, Roderick had had time to come back.

He wandered about for several hours, but he found only the sunny stillness of the mountain-sides.  Before long he parted company with Singleton, who, to his suggestion that separation would multiply their resources, assented with a silent, frightened look which reflected too vividly his own rapidly-dawning thought.  The day was magnificent; the sun was everywhere; the storm had lashed the lower slopes into a deeper flush of autumnal color, and the snow-peaks reared themselves against the near horizon in glaring blocks and dazzling spires.  Rowland made his way to several chalets, but most of them were empty.  He thumped at their low, foul doors with a kind of nervous, savage anger; he challenged the stupid silence to tell him something about his friend.  Some of these places had evidently not been open in months.  The silence everywhere was horrible; it seemed to mock at his impatience and to be a conscious symbol of calamity.  In the midst of it, at the door of one of the chalets, quite alone, sat a hideous cretin, who grinned at Rowland over his goitre when, hardly knowing what he did, he questioned him.  The creature’s family was scattered on the mountain-sides; he could give Rowland no help to find them.  Rowland climbed into many awkward places, and skirted, intently and peeringly, many an ugly chasm and steep-dropping ledge.  But the sun, as I have said, was everywhere; it illumined the deep places over which, not knowing where to turn next, he halted and lingered, and showed him nothing but the stony Alpine void—­nothing so human even as death.  At noon he paused in his quest and sat down on a stone; the conviction was pressing upon him that the worst that was now possible was true.  He suspended his search; he was afraid to go on.  He sat there for an hour, sick to the depths of his soul.  Without his knowing why, several things, chiefly trivial, that had happened during the last two years and that he had quite forgotten, became vividly present to his mind.  He was aroused at last by the sound of a stone dislodged near by, which rattled down the mountain.  In a moment, on a steep, rocky slope opposite to him, he beheld a figure cautiously descending—­a figure which was not Roderick.  It was Singleton, who had seen him and began to beckon to him.