in a sky clear-blue already.  How tiny everything looked below—­hotel, trees, village, chalets—­little toy things!  He had never before felt the sheer joy of being high up.  The rain-clouds, torn and driven in huge white shapes along the mountains to the South, were like an army of giants with chariots and white horses hurrying away.  He thought suddenly:  “Suppose I had died when my heart pumped so!  Would it have mattered the least bit?  Everything would be going on just the same, the sun shining, the blue up there the same; and those toy things down in the valley.”  That jealousy of his an hour ago, why—­it was nothing—­he himself nothing!  What did it matter if she were nice to that fellow in the brown coat?  What did anything matter when the whole thing was so big—­and he such a tiny scrap of it?

On the edge of the plateau, to mark the highest point, someone had erected a rude cross, which jutted out stark against the blue sky.  It looked cruel somehow, sagged all crooked, and out of place up here; a piece of bad manners, as if people with only one idea had dragged it in, without caring whether or no it suited what was around it.  One might just as well introduce one of these rocks into that jolly dark church where he had left her the other day, as put a cross up here.

A sound of bells, and of sniffing and scuffling, roused him; a large grey goat had come up and was smelling at his hair—­the leader of a flock, that were soon all round him, solemnly curious, with their queer yellow oblong-pupilled eyes, and their quaint little beards and tails.  Awfully decent beasts—­and friendly!  What jolly things to model!  He lay still (having learnt from the fisherman, his guardian, that necessary habit in the presence of all beasts), while the leader sampled the flavour of his neck.  The passage of that long rough tongue athwart his skin gave him an agreeable sensation, awakened a strange deep sense of comradeship.  He restrained his desire to stroke the creature’s nose.  It appeared that they now all wished to taste his neck; but some were timid, and the touch of their tongues simply a tickle, so that he was compelled to laugh, and at that peculiar sound they withdrew and gazed at him.  There seemed to be no one with them; then, at a little distance, quite motionless in the shade of a rock, he spied the goatherd, a boy about his own age.  How lonely he must be up here all day!  Perhaps he talked to his goats.  He looked as if he might.  One would get to have queer thoughts up here, get to know the rocks, and clouds, and beasts, and what they all meant.  The goatherd uttered a peculiar whistle, and something, Lennan could not tell exactly what, happened among the goats—­a sort of “Here, Sir!” seemed to come from them.  And then the goatherd moved out from the shade and went over to the edge of the plateau, and two of the goats that were feeding there thrust their noses into his hand, and rubbed themselves against his legs.  The three looked beautiful standing there together on the edge against the sky. . . .