Part 8 (1/2)

You will be tired to-morrow.”

”Not till to-morrow evening,” she said, with a laugh. She looked upward to the starlit sky. ”It will be fine, I hope. Oh, it _must_ be fine.

To-morrow is my one day. I do so want it to be perfect,” she exclaimed.

”I don't think you need fear.”

She held out her hand to him.

”This is good-by, I suppose,” she said, and she did not hide the regret the words brought to her.

Chayne took her hand and kept it for a second or two. He ought to start an hour and a half before her. That he knew very well. But he answered:

”No. We go the same road for a little while. When do you start?”

”At half past one.”

”I too. It will be daybreak before we say good-by. I wonder whether you will sleep at all to-night. I never do the first night.”

He spoke lightly, and she answered him in the same key.

”I shall hardly know whether I sleep or wake, with the noise of that stream rising through my window. For so far back as I can remember I always dream of running water.”

The words laid hold upon Chayne's imagination and fixed her in his memories. He knew nothing of her really, except just this one curious fact. She dreamed of running water. Somehow it was fitting that she should. There was a kind of resemblance; running water was, in a way, an image of her. She seemed in her nature to be as clear and fresh; yet she was as elusive; and when she laughed, her laugh had a music as light and free.

She went into the chalet. Through the window Chayne saw her strike a match and hold it to the candle. She stood for a moment looking out at him gravely, with the light s.h.i.+ning upward upon her young face. Then a smile hesitated upon her lips and slowly took possession of her cheeks and eyes. She turned and went into her room.

CHAPTER VII

THE AIGUILLE D'ARGENTIeRE

Chayne smoked another pipe alone and then walking to the end of the little terrace looked down on to the glistening field of ice below. Along that side of the chalet no light was burning. Was she listening? Was she asleep? The pity which had been kindled within him grew as he thought upon her. To-morrow she would be going back to a life she clearly hated.

On the whole he came to the conclusion that the world might have been better organized. He lit his candle and went to bed, and it seemed that not five minutes had pa.s.sed before one of his guides knocked upon his door. When he came into the living-room Sylvia Thesiger was already breakfasting.

”Did you sleep?” he asked.

”I was too excited,” she answered. ”But I am not tired”; and certainly there was no trace of fatigue in her appearance.

They started at half past one and went up behind the hut.

The stars s.h.i.+mmered overhead in a dark and cloudless sky. The night was still; as yet there was no sign of dawn. The great rock cliffs of the Chardonnet across the glacier and the towering ice-slopes of the Aiguille Verte beneath which they pa.s.sed were all hidden in darkness. They might have been walking on some desolate plain of stones flat from horizon to horizon. They walked in single file, Jean leading with a lighted lantern in his hand, so that Sylvia, who followed next, might pick her way amongst the boulders. Thus they marched for two hours along the left bank of the glacier and then descended on to ice. They went forward partly on moraine, partly on ice at the foot of the crags of the Aiguille Verte.

And gradually the darkness thinned. Dim ma.s.ses of black rock began to loom high overhead, and to all seeming very far away. The sky paled, the dim ma.s.ses of rock drew near about the climbers, and over the steep walls, the light flowed into the white basin of the glacier as though from every quarter of the sky.

Sylvia stopped and Chayne came up with her.

”Well?” he asked; and as he saw her face his thoughts were suddenly swept back to the morning when the beauty of the ice-world was for the first time vouchsafed to him. He seemed to recapture the fine emotion of that moment.

Sylvia stood gazing with parted lips up that wide and level glacier to its rock-embattled head. The majestic silence of the place astounded her.

There was no whisper of wind, no rustling of trees, no sound of any bird.