The mist was still lingering in the valleys, though the remote peaks had been kindled more than an hour by the touch of sunrise. As Lynde paced up and down the trottoir in front of the Couronne hotel, he drew out his watch from time to time and glanced expectantly towards the hotel entrance. In the middle of the street stood a couple of guides, idly holding the bridles of three mules, two of which were furnished with side-saddles. It was nearly half an hour past the appointment, and the Denhams, who had retired at eight o'clock the night before in order to be fresh for an early start up the mountain, had made no sign. Lynde himself had set the lark an example that morning by breakfasting by candle-light. Here were thirty minutes lost. He quickened his pace up and down in front of the hotel, as if his own rapidity of movement would possibly exert some occult influence in hastening the loiterers; but another quarter of an hour dragged on without bringing them.

Lynde was impatiently consulting his watch for the twentieth time when
Miss Denham's troubled face showed itself in the doorway.

"Isn't it too bad, Mr. Lynde? Aunt Gertrude can't go!"

"Can't go!" faltered Lynde.

"She has a headache from yesterday's ride. She got up, and dressed, but was obliged to lie down again."

"Then that's the end of it, I suppose," said Lynde despondently. He beckoned to one of the guides.

"I don't know," said Miss Denham, standing in an attitude of irresolution on the upper step, with her curved eyebrows drawn together like a couple of blackbirds touching bills. "I don't know what to do…she insists on our going. I shall never forgive myself for letting her see that I was disappointed. She added my concern for her illness to my regret about the excursion, and thought me more disappointed than I really was. Then she declared she would go in spite of her headache… unless I went."

The gloom which had overspread Lynde's countenance vanished.

"It is not one of her severest turns," continued Miss Ruth, ceasing to be a statue on a pedestal and slowly descending the hotel steps with her waterproof trailing from her left arm, "and she is quite capable of executing her threat. What shall we do, Mr. Lynde?"

"I think we had better try the mountain—for her sake," answered Lynde. "We need not attempt the Mer de Glace, you know; that can be left for another day. The ascent takes only two hours, the descent half an hour less; we can easily be back in time for lunch."

"Then let us do that."

Lynde selected the more amiable-looking of the two mules with side-saddles, dismissed one of the guides after a brief consultation, and helped Miss Denham to mount. In attending to these preliminaries Lynde had sufficient mastery over himself not to make any indecorous betrayal of his intense satisfaction at the turn affairs had taken. Fortune had given her into his hands for five hours! She should listen this time to what he had to say, though the mountain should fall.

At a signal from Lynde the remaining guide led the way at a brisk pace through the bustling town. In front of the various hotels were noisy groups of tourists about to set forth on pilgrimages, some bound for the neighboring glaciers and cascades, and others preparing for more distant and more hardy enterprises. It was a perfect Babel of voices—French, Scotch, German, Italian, and English; with notes of every sort of patois—above which the strident bass of the mules soared triumphantly at intervals. There are not many busier spots than Chamouni at early morning in the height of the season.

Our friends soon left the tumult and confusion behind them, and were skirting the pleasant meadows outside of the town. Passing by the way of the English church, they crossed to the opposite bank of the Arve, and in a few minutes gained the hamlet lying at the foot of Montanvert. Then the guide took the bridle of Miss Ruth's mule and the ascent began. The road stretches up the mountain in a succession of zigzags with sharp turns. Here and there the path is quarried out of the begrudging solid rock; in places the terrace is several yards wide and well wooded, but for the most part it is a barren shelf with a shaggy wall rising abruptly on one hand and a steep slope descending on the other. Higher up, these slopes become quite respectable precipices. A dozen turns, which were accomplished in unbroken silence, brought the party to an altitude of several hundred feet above the level.

"I—I don't know that I wholly like it," said Miss Ruth, holding on to the pommel of her saddle and looking down into the valley, checkered with fields and criss-crossed with shining rivulets. "Why do the mules persist in walking on the very edge?"

"That is a trick they get from carrying panniers. You are supposed to be a pannier, and the careful animal doesn't want to brush you off against the rocks. See this creature of mine; he has that hind hoof slipping over the precipice all the while. But he'll not slip; he's as sure-footed as a chamois, and has no more taste for tumbling off the cliff than you have. These mules are wonderfully intelligent. Observe how cautiously they will put foot on a loose stone, feeling all around it."

"I wish they were intelligent enough to be led in the middle of the path," said Miss Ruth, "but I suppose the guide knows."

"You may trust to him; he is a person of varied accomplishments, the chief of which is he doesn't understand a word of English. So you can scold, or say anything you like, without the least reserve. I picked him out for that," added Lynde, with a bland smile. "His comrade was a linguist."

"If I have anything disagreeable to say," replied Miss Ruth, with another bland smile, "I shall say it in French."

The guide, who spoke four languages, including English, never changed a muscle. Lynde, just before starting, had closely examined the two guides on their lingual acquirements—and retained the wrong man.

"I trust you will have no occasion, Miss Denham, to be anything but amiable, and that you will begin by granting me a favor. Will you?"

"Cela depend."

"There you go into French! I haven't offended you?"

"Oh, no. What is the favor?—in English."

"That you will let me call you Miss Ruth, instead of Miss Denham."

"I haven't the slightest objection, Mr. Lynde."

"And now I want you"—

"What, another favor?"

"Of course. Who ever heard of one favor?"

"To be sure! What is the second?"

"I want that you should be a little sorry when all this comes to an end."

"You mean when we leave Chamouni?"

"Yes."

"I shall be sorry then," said Miss Ruth frankly, "but I am not going to be sorry beforehand."

There was something very sweet to Lynde in her candor, but there was also something that restrained him for the moment from being as explicit as he had intended. He rode on awhile without speaking, watching the girl as the mule now and then turned the sharp angle of the path and began a new ascent. This movement always brought her face to face with him a moment—she on the grade above, and he below. Miss Ruth had grown accustomed to the novel situation, and no longer held on by the pommel of the saddle. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, pliantly lending herself to the awkward motion of the animal. Over her usual travelling-habit she had thrown the long waterproof which reached to her feet. As she sat there in a half-listless attitude, she was the very picture of the Queen of Sheba seated upon Deacon Twombly's mare. Lynde could not help seeing it; but he was schooling himself by degrees to this fortuitous resemblance. It was painful, but it was inevitable, and he would get used to it in time. "Perhaps," he mused, "if I had never had that adventure with the poor insane girl, I might not have looked twice at Miss Denham when we met—and loved her. It was the poor little queen who shaped my destiny, and I oughtn't to be ungrateful." He determined to tell the story to Miss Ruth some time when a fitting occasion offered.

It was only when the likeness flashed upon Lynde suddenly, as it had done in the grove the previous day, that it now had the power to startle him. At the present moment it did not even seriously annoy him. In an idle, pensive way he noted the coincidence of the man leading the mule. The man was Morton and the mule was Mary! Lynde smiled to himself at the reflection that Mary would probably not accept the analogy with very good grace if she knew about it. This carried him to Rivermouth; then he thought of Cinderella's slipper, packed away in the old hair-trunk in the closet, and how perfectly the slipper would fit one of those feet which a floating fold of the waterproof that instant revealed to him—and he was in Switzerland again.

"Miss Ruth," he said, looking up quickly and urging his mule as closely behind hers as was practicable, "what are your plans to be when your uncle comes?"

"When my uncle comes we shall have no plans—aunt Gertrude and I. Uncle
Denham always plans for everybody."

"I don't imagine he will plan for me," said Lynde gloomily. "I wish he would, for I shall not know what to do with myself."

"I thought you were going to St. Petersburg."

"I have given that up."

"It's to be Northern Germany, then?"

"No, I have dropped that idea, too. Will Mr. Denham remain here any time?"

"Probably not long."

"What is to become of me after you are gone!" exclaimed Lynde. "When I think of Mr. Denham sweeping down on Chamouni to carry you off, I am tempted to drive this mule straight over the brink of one of these precipices!"

The girl leaned forward, looking at the rocky wall of the Flegere through an opening in the pines, and made no reply.

"Miss Ruth," said Lynde, "I must speak!"

"Do not speak," she said, turning upon him with a half-imperious, half-appealing gesture, "I forbid you;" and then, more gently, "We have four or five days, perhaps a week, to be together; we are true, frank friends. Let us be just that to the end."

"Those are mercifully cruel words," returned the young man, with a dull pain at his heart. "It is a sweet way of saying a bitter thing."

"It is a way of saying that your friendship is very dear to me, Mr. Lynde," she replied, sitting erect in the saddle, with the brightness and the blackness deepening in her eyes. "I wonder if I can make you understand how I prize it. My life has not been quite like that of other girls, partly because I have lived much abroad, and partly because I have been very delicate ever since my childhood; I had a serious lung trouble then, which has never left me. You would not think it, to look at me. Perhaps it is the anxiety I have given aunt Gertrude which has made her so tenacious of my affection that I have scarcely been permitted to form even those intimacies which girls form among themselves. I have never known any one—any gentleman—as intimately as I have known you. She has let me have you for my friend."

"But Miss Ruth"—

"Mr. Lynde," she said, interrupting him, "it was solely to your friendship that my aunt confided me to-day. I should be deceiving her if I allowed you to speak as—as you were speaking."

Lynde saw his mistake. He should have addressed himself in the first instance to the aunt. He had been lacking in proper regard for the convenances, forgetting that Ruth's education had been different from that of American girls. At home, if you love a girl you tell her so; over here, you go and tell her grandmother. Lynde dropped his head and remained silent, resolving to secure an interview with Mrs. Denham that night if possible. After a moment or two he raised his face. "Miss Ruth," said he, "if I had to choose, I would rather be your friend than any other woman's lover."

"That is settled, then," she returned, with heightened color. "We will not refer to this again;" and she brushed away a butterfly that was fluttering about her conceitedly in its new golden corselet.

Meanwhile the guide marched on stolidly with Ruth's reins thrown loosely over the crook of his elbow. In his summer courses up and down the mountain, the man, with his four languages, had probably assisted dumbly at much fugitive love-making and many a conjugal passage-at-arms. He took slight note of the conversation between the two young folks; he was clearly more interested in a strip of black cloud that had come within the half hour and hung itself over the Aiguille du Dru.

The foot-path and the bridle-road from Chamouni unite at the Caillet, a spring of fresh water halfway up the mountain. There the riders dismounted and rested five or six minutes at a rude hut perched like a brown bird under the cliff.

"I've the fancy to go on foot the rest of the distance," Lynde remarked, as he assisted Ruth into the saddle again.

"Then I'll let you lead the mule, if you will," said Ruth. "I'm not the least afraid."

"That is an excellent idea! Why did you not think of it sooner? I shall expect a buonamano, like a real guide, you know."

"I will give it you in advance," she said gayly, reaching forward and pretending to hold a coin between her thumb and finger.

Lynde caught her hand and retained it an instant, but did not dare to press it. He was in mortal fear of a thing which he could have crushed like a flower in his palm.

The young man drew the reins over his arm and moved forward, glancing behind him at intervals to assure himself that his charge was all right. As they approached the summit of the mountain the path took abrupter turns, and was crossed in numberless places by the channels of winter avalanches, which had mown down great pines as if they had been blades of grass. Here and there a dry water-course stretched like a wrinkle along the scarred face of the hill.

"Look at that, Miss Ruth!" cried Lynde, checking the mule and pointing to a slope far below them.

Nature, who loves to do a gentle thing even in her most savage moods, had taken one of those empty water-courses and filled it from end to end with forget-me-nots. As the wind ruffled the millions of petals, this bed of flowers, only a few inches wide but nearly a quarter of a mile in length, looked like a flashing stream of heavenly blue water rushing down the mountain side.

By and by the faint kling-kling of a cowbell sounding far up the height told the travellers that they were nearing the plateau. Occasionally they descried a herdsman's chalet, pitched at an angle against the wind on the edge of an arete, or clinging like a wasp's-nest to some jutting cornice of rock. After making four or five short turns, the party passed through a clump of scraggy, wind-swept pines, and suddenly found themselves at the top of Montanvert.

A few paces brought them to the Pavilion, a small inn kept by the guide Couttet. Here the mules were turned over to the hostler, and Miss Ruth and Lynde took a quarter of an hour's rest, examining the collection of crystals and moss-agates and horn-carvings which M. Couttet has for show in the apartment that serves him as salon, cafe, and museum. Then the two set out for the rocks overlooking the glacier.

The cliff rises precipitously two hundred and fifty feet above the frozen sea, whose windings can be followed, for a distance of five miles, to the walls of the Grandes and Petites Jorasses. Surveyed from this height, the Mer de Glace presents the appearance of an immense ploughed field covered by a fall of snow that has become dingy. The peculiar corrugation of the surface is scarcely discernible, and one sees nothing of the wonderful crevasses, those narrow and often fathomless partings of the ice, to look into which is like looking into a split sapphire. The first view from the cliff is disappointing, but presently the marvel of it all assails and possesses one.

"I should like to go down on the ice," said Ruth, after regarding the scene for several minutes in silence.

"We must defer that to another day," said Lynde. "The descent of the moraine from this point is very arduous, and is seldom attempted by ladies. Besides, if we do anything we ought to cross the glacier and go home by the way of the Mauvais Pas. We will do that yet. Let us sit upon this boulder and talk."

"What shall we talk about? I don't feel like talking."

"I'll talk to you. I don't know of what… I will tell you a story."

"A story, Mr. Lynde? I like stories as if I were only six years old. But I don't like those stories which begin with 'Once there was a little girl,' who always turns out to be the little girl that is listening."

"Mine is not of that kind," replied Lynde, with a smile, steadying Miss Ruth by the hand as she seated herself on the boulder; "and yet it touches on you indirectly. It all happened long ago."

"It concerns me, and happened long ago? I am interested already. Begin!"

"It was in the summer of 1872. I was a clerk in a bank then, at Rivermouth, and the directors had given me a vacation. I hired a crazy old horse and started on a journey through New Hampshire. I didn't have any destination; I merely purposed to ride on and on until I got tired, and then ride home again. The weather was beautiful, and for the first three or four days I never enjoyed myself better in my life. The flowers were growing, the birds were singing—the robins in the sunshine and the whippoorwills at dusk—and the hours were not long enough for me. At night I slept in a tumble-down barn, or anywhere, like a born tramp. I had a mountain brook for a wash-basin and the west wind for a towel. Sometimes I invited myself to a meal at a farm-house when there wasn't a tavern handy; and when there wasn't any farm-house, and I was very hungry, I lay down under a tree and read in a book of poems."

"Oh, that was just delightful!" said Ruth, knitting the fingers of both hands over one knee and listening to him with a child-like abandon which Lynde found bewitching.

"On the fourth day—there are some persons crossing on the ice," said
Lynde, interrupting himself.

"Never mind the persons on the ice!"

"On the fourth day I came to a wild locality among the Ragged Mountains, where there was not a human being nor a house to be seen. I had got up before breakfast was ready that morning, and I was quite anxious to see the smoke curling up from some kitchen chimney. Here, as I mounted a hill-side, the saddle-girth broke, and I jumped off to fix it. Somehow, I don't know precisely how, the horse gave a plunge, jerked the reins out of my hands, and started on a dead run for Rivermouth."

"That wasn't very pleasant," suggested Ruth.

"Not a bit. I couldn't catch the animal, and I had the sense not to try. I climbed to the brow of the hill and was not sorry to see a snug village lying in the valley."

"What village was that?"

"I don't know to this day—with any certainty. I didn't find out then, and afterwards I didn't care to learn. Well, I shouldered my traps and started for the place to procure another horse, not being used to going under the saddle myself. I had a hard time before I got through; but that I shall not tell you about. On my way to the village I met a young girl. This young girl is the interesting part of the business."

"She always is, you know."

"She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen—up to that time. She was dressed all in white, and looked like an angel. I expected she would spread wing and vanish before I could admire her half enough; but she did not. The moment she saw me she walked straight to the spot where I stood, and looked me squarely in the face."

"Wasn't that rather rude—for an angel?"

"You wouldn't have thought so. She did it like a young goddess with the supreme prerogative to flash herself that way on mortals by the roadside."

"Oh, she was a young goddess as well as an angel."

"After she had looked me in the eye a second," continued Lynde, not heeding the criticism, "she said—what do you suppose she said?"

"How can I imagine?"

"You could not, in a thousand years. Instead of saying, 'Good-morning, sir,' and dropping me a courtesy, she made herself very tall and said, with quite a grand air, 'I am the Queen of Sheba!' Just fancy it. Then she turned on her heel and ran up the road."

"Oh, that was very rude. Is this a true story, Mr. Lynde?"

"That is the sad part of it, Miss Ruth. This poor child had lost her reason, as I learned subsequently. She had wandered out of an asylum in the neighborhood. After a while some men came and took her back again—on my horse, which they had captured in the road."

"The poor, poor girl! I am sorry for her to the heart. Your story began like a real romance; is that all of it! It is sad enough."

"That is all. Of course I never saw her afterwards."

"But you remembered her, and pitied her?"

"For a long time, Miss Ruth."

"I like you for that. But what has this to do with me? You said"—

"The story touched on you indirectly?"

"Yes."

"Well, so it does; I will tell you how. This poor girl was beautiful enough in your own fashion to be your sister, and when I first saw you"—

"Monsieur," said the guide, respectfully lifting a forefinger to his hat as he approached, "I think it looks like rain."

The man had spoken in English. Ruth went crimson to the temples, and
Lynde's face assumed a comical expression of dismay.

"Looks like rain," he repeated mechanically. "I thought you told me you did not understand English."

"Monsieur is mistaken. It is Jean Macquart that does not spik English."

"Very well," said Lynde; "if it is going to rain we had better be moving. It would not be pleasant to get blockaded up here by a storm—or rather it would! Are the animals ready?"

"They are waiting at the foot of the path, monsieur."

Lynde lost no time getting Ruth into the saddle, and the party began their descent, the guide again in charge of the girl's mule. On the downward journey they unavoidably faced the precipices, and the road appeared to them much steeper than when they ascended.

"Is it wind or rain, do you think?" asked Lynde, looking at a wicked black cloud that with angrily curled white edges was lowering itself over the valley.

"I think it is both, monsieur."

"How soon?"

"I cannot know. Within an hour, surely."

"Perhaps we were wrong to attempt going down," said Lynde.

"Monsieur might be kept at Couttet's one, two—three days. But, if monsieur wishes, I will go on and tell the friends of mademoiselle that you are detained."

"Oh, no!" cried Ruth, filled with horror at the suggestion. "We MUST return. I shall not mind the rain, if it comes."

As she spoke, a loose handful of large drops rustled through the pine-boughs overhead, and softly dashed themselves against the rocks.

"It has come," said Lynde.

"I have my waterproof," returned the girl. "I shall do very well. But you"—

The sentence was cut short by a flash of lightning, followed by a heavy peal of thunder that rolled through the valley and reverberated for one or two minutes among the hills. The guide grasped the reins close up to the bits, and urged the mule forward at a brisk trot. The sky cleared, and for a moment it looked as if the storm had drifted elsewhere; but the party had not advanced twenty paces before there was a strange rustling sound in the air, and the rain came down. The guide whipped off a coarse woollen coat he wore, and threw it over the girl's shoulders, tying it by the sleeves under her chin.

"Oh, you must not do that!" she cried, "you will catch your death!"

"Mademoiselle," he replied, laughing, as he gave another knot to the sleeves, "for thirty-eight years, man and boy, I have been rained upon and snowed upon—and voila!"

"You're a fine fellow, my friend, if you do speak English," cried
Lynde, "and I hope some honest girl has found it out before now."

"Monsieur," returned the man, signing himself with the cross, "she and the little one are in heaven."

The rain came down in torrents; it pattered like shot against the rocks; it beat the air of the valley into mist. Except the path immediately before them, and the rocky perpendicular wall now on their right and now on their left, the travellers could distinguish nothing through the blinding rain. Shortly the wind began to blow, whistling in the stiff pines as it whistles among the taut cordage of a ship in a gale. At intervals it tore along the salient zigzags and threatened to sweep the mules off their legs. The flashes of lightning now followed one another in rapid succession, and the thunder crashed incessantly through the gorges. It appeared as if the great cones and cromlechs were tumbling pell-mell from every direction into the valley.

Though the situation of the three persons on the mountain side was disagreeable to the last extent, they were exposed to only one especial danger—that from a land-slide or a detached boulder. At every ten steps the guide glanced up the dripping steep, and listened. Even the mules were not without a prescience of this peril. The sharpest lightning did not make them wince, but at the faintest sound of a splinter of rock or a pebble rustling down the slope, their ears instantly went forward at an acute angle. The footing soon became difficult on account of the gullies formed by the rain. In spite of his anxiety concerning Ruth, Lynde could not help admiring the skill with which the sagacious animals felt their way. Each fore hoof as it touched the earth seemed endowed with the sense of fingers.

Lynde had dismounted after the rain set in and was walking beside the girl's mule. Once, as an unusually heavy clap of thunder burst over their heads, she had impulsively stretched out her hand to him; he had taken it, and still held it, covered by a fold of the waterproof, steadying her so. He was wet to the skin, but Ruth's double wraps had preserved her thus far from anything beyond the dampness.

"Are you cold?" he asked. Her hand was like ice.

"Not very," she replied in a voice rendered nearly inaudible by a peal of thunder that shook the mountain. A ball of crimson fire hung for a second in the murky sky and then shot into the valley. The guide glanced at Lynde, as much as to say, "That struck."

They were rapidly leaving the wind above them; its decrease was noticeable as they neared the Caillet. The rain also had lost its first fury, and was falling steadily. Here and there bright green patches of the level plain showed themselves through the broken vapors. Ruth declined to halt at the Caillet; her aunt would be distracted about her, and it was better to take advantage of the slight lull in the storm, and push on. So they stopped at the hut only long enough for Lynde to procure a glass of cognac, a part of which he induced the girl to drink. Then they resumed their uncomfortable march.

When Lynde again looked at his companion he saw that her lips were purple, and her teeth set. She confessed this time to being very cold. The rain had at length penetrated the thick wrappings and thoroughly chilled her. Lynde was in despair, and began bitterly to reproach himself for having undertaken the excursion without Mrs. Denham. Her presence could not have warded off the storm, but it would have rendered it possible for the party to postpone their descent until pleasant weather. Undoubtedly it had been his duty to leave Miss Ruth at the inn and return alone to Chamouni. He had not thought of that when the guide made his suggestion. There was now nothing to do but to hurry.

The last part of the descent was accomplished at a gait which offered the cautious mules no chance to pick their steps. Lynde's animal, left to its own devices, was following on behind, nibbling the freshened grass. But the road was not so rough, and the stretches protected by the trees were in good condition. In less than three quarters of an hour from the half-way hut, the party were at the foot of the mountain, where they found a close carriage which Mrs. Denham had thoughtfully sent to meet them. Benumbed with the cold and cramped by riding so long in one position, the girl was unable to stand when she was lifted from the saddle. Lynde carried her to the carriage and wrapped her in a heavy afghan that lay on the seat. They rode to the hotel without exchanging a word. Lynde was in too great trouble, and Ruth was too exhausted to speak. She leaned back with her eyes partially closed, and did not open them until the carriage stopped. Mrs. Denham stood at the hall door.

"Mr. Lynde! Mr. Lynde!" she said, taking the girl in her arms.

The tone of reproach in her voice cut him to the quick.

"He was in no way to blame, aunt," said Ruth, trying to bring a smile to her blanched face; "it was I who WOULD go." She reached back her hand unperceived by Mrs. Denham and gave it to Lynde. He raised it gratefully to his lips, but as he relinquished it and turned away he experienced a sudden, inexplicable pang—as if he had said farewell to her.