About half-way up, where the sleighs stopped, Lady Mary gave in. Pauline and Rochester went forward on foot, and with a guide in front. Below them was a wonderful unseen world, unseen except when the snow for a moment ceased to fall, and they caught vague, awe-inspiring glimpses of ravines and precipices, tree-clad gorges, reaching down a dizzy height to the valley below. Above them was a plateau, black with pine trees. Higher still, the invisible mountain tops.

“It is only a few hundred yards further,” Rochester said, holding his companion by the arm. “What a country, though! I wonder if it ever stops snowing.”

“It is wonderful!” she murmured. “Wonderful!”

And then, as though in some strange relation to his words, the storm of whirling snow-flakes suddenly ceased. The thin veil passed away from overhead like gossamer. They saw a clear sky. They saw, even, the gleam of reflected sunshine, and as the mist lifted, the country above and beyond unrolled itself in one grand and splendid transformation scene: woods above woods; snow-clad peaks, all glittering with their burden of icicles and snow; and above, a white chaos, where the mountain-peak struck the clouds.

They paused for a moment, breathless.

“It is like Naudheim himself,” she declared. “This is the land he spoke of. This is the place to which he climbed. It is wonderful!”

“Come,” Rochester said. “We must be up before the darkness.”

Slowly they made their way along the mountain road, which their guide in front was doing all he could to make smooth for them. And then at the corner they found a log hut, to which their guide pointed triumphantly.

“It is there!” he exclaimed—“there where they live, the two madmen. Beyond, you see, is the village of the woodhewers.”

Rochester nodded. They struggled a few steps upwards, and then paused to look with wonder at the scene below. The one log cabin before which they were now standing, had been built alone. Barely a hundred yards away, across the ravine, were twenty or thirty similar ones, from the roofs of which the smoke went curling upwards. It seemed for a moment as though they had climbed above the world of noises—climbed into the land of eternal silence. Before they had had time, however, to frame the thought, they heard the crashing of timber across the ravine, and a great tree fell inwards. A sound like distant thunder rose and swelled at every moment.

“It is the machinery,” their guide told them. “The trees fall and are stripped of their boughs. Then they go down the ravine there, and along the slide all the way to the river. See them all the way, like a great worm. Day and night, month by month—there is never a minute when a tree does not fall.”

Again they heard the crashing, and another tree fell. They heard the rumble of the slide in the forest. The peculiar scent of fresh sap seemed like a perfume in the air. Then suddenly the snow began to fall again. They could not see across the ravine.

The guide knocked at the door and opened it. Rochester and Pauline passed in....

There was something almost familiar about the little scene. It was, in many respects, so entirely as she had always imagined it. Naudheim, coatless, collarless, with open waistcoat, twisted braces, and unkempt hair, was striding up and down the room, banging his hands against his side, dictating to the younger man who sat before the rude pine table.

“So we arrive,” they heard his harsh, eager tones, “so we arrive at the evolution of that consciousness which may justly be termed eternal—the consciousness which has become subject to these primary and irresistible laws, the understanding of which has baffled for so many ages the students of every country. So we come——”

Naudheim broke off in the middle of his sentence. A rush of cold air had swept into the room. He thrust forward an angry, inquiring countenance toward the visitors. The young man sprang to his feet.

“Pauline!” he exclaimed.

He recognised Rochester, and stepped back with a momentary touch of his old passionate repugnance, not unmixed with fear. He recovered himself, however, almost immediately, Rochester gazed at him in amazement. It would have been hard, indeed, to have recognised the Bertrand Saton of the old days, in the robust and bearded man who stood there now with his eyes fixed upon Pauline. His cheeks were weather-beaten but brown with health. He wore a short, unkempt beard, a flannel shirt with collar but no tie, tweed clothes, which might indeed have come, at one time or another, from Saville Row, but were now spent with age, and worn out of all shape.

Pauline’s heart leaped with joy. Her eyes were wet. It had been worth while, then. He had found salvation.

“We hadn’t the least right to come, of course,” she began, recognising that speech alone could dissolve that strange silence and discomposure which seemed to have fallen upon all of them. “Mr. Rochester and Lady Mary and I are going to St. Moritz, and I persuaded them to stay over here and see whether we couldn’t rout you out. What a wonderful place!” she exclaimed.

“It is a wonderful place, madam!” Naudheim exclaimed glowering at them with darkening face. “It is wonderful because we are many thousands of feet up from that rotten, stinking little life, that cauldron of souls, into which my young friend here had very nearly pitched his own little offering.”

“It was we who sent him to you,” Pauline said gently.

“So long as you have not come to fetch him away,” Naudheim muttered.

Pauline shook her head.

“We have come,” she said, “because we care for him, because we were anxious to know whether he had come to his own. We will go away the moment you send us.”

“You will have some tea,” Naudheim growled, a little more graciously. “Saton, man, be hospitable. It is goat’s milk, and none too sweet at that, and I won’t answer for the butter.”

Saton spoke little. Pauline was content to watch him. They drank tea out of thick china cups, but over their conversation there was always a certain reserve. Naudheim listened and watched, like a mother jealous of strangers who might rob her of her young. After tea, however, he disappeared from the room for a few moments, and Rochester walked toward the window.

“It is very good of you to come, Pauline,” Saton said. “I shall work all the better for this little glimpse of you.”

“Will the work,” she asked softly, “never be done?”

He shook his head.

“Why should it? One passes from field to field, and our lives are not long enough, nor our brains great enough, to reach the place where we may call halt.”

“Do you mean,” she asked, “that you will live here all your days?”

“Why not?” he answered. “I have tried other things, and you know what they made of me. If I live here till I am as old as Naudheim, I shall only be suffering a just penance.”

“But you are young,” she murmured. “There are things in the world worth having. There is a life there worth living. Solitude such as this is the greatest panacea the world could offer for all you have been through. But it is not meant to last. We want you back again, Bertrand.”

His eyes were suddenly on fire. He shrank a little away from her.

“Don’t!” he begged. “Don’t, Pauline. I am living my punishment here, and I have borne it without once looking back. Don’t make it harder.”

“I do not wish to make it harder,” she declared, “and yet I meant what I said. It is not right that you should spend all your days here. It is not right for your own sake, it is not right——”

She held out her hands to him suddenly.

“It is not right for mine,” she whispered.

Rochester stepped outside. Again the snow had ceased. In the forest he could hear the whirl of machinery and the crashing of the falling timber. He stood for a moment with clenched hands, with unseeing eyes, with ears in which was ringing still the memory of that low, passionate cry. And then the fit passed. He looked down to the little half-way house where he had left his wife. He fancied he could see someone waving a white handkerchief from the platform of pine logs. It was all so right, after all, so right and natural. He began to descend alone.

Saton brought her down about an hour later. Their faces told all that there was to say.

“Bertrand is going to stay here for another year,” Pauline said, answering Lady Mary’s unspoken question. “The first part of his work with Naudheim will be finished then, and we think he will have earned a vacation.”

Saton held out his hands to Rochester.

“Mr. Rochester,” he said, “I have never asked you to forgive me for all the hard things I have said and thought of you, for my ingratitude, and—for other things.”

“Don’t speak of them,” Rochester interrupted.

“I won’t,” Saton continued quickly. “I can’t. That chapter of my life is buried. I cannot bear to think of it even now. I cannot bear to come in contact with anything which reminds me of it.”

Rochester took his hand and grasped it heartily.

“Don’t be morbid about it,” he said. “Every man should have at least two chances in life. You had your first, and it was a rank failure. That was because you had unnatural help, and bad advice. The second time, I am glad to see that you have succeeded. You have done this on your own. You have proved that the real man is the present man.”

Saton drew Pauline towards him with a gesture which was almost reverent.

“I think that Pauline knows,” he said. “I hope so.”

Early in the morning their sleigh rattled off. Saton stood outside the cottage, waving his hand. Naudheim was by his side, his arm resting gently upon the young man’s shoulder. A fine snow was falling around them. The air was clean and pure—the air of Heaven. There was no sound to break the deep stillness but the tinkle of the sleigh-bells, and behind, the rhythmic humming of the machinery, and the crashing of the falling trees.

“Naudheim is a great master,” Rochester said.

Pauline smiled through her tears.

“Bertrand isn’t such a very bad pupil.”

THE END

He possesses the magic art of narration.—New York Herald.

Mr. Oppenheim never fails to entertain us.—Boston Transcript.

The author has acquired an admirable technique of the sort demanded by the novel of intrigue and mystery.—The Dial, Chicago.

Mr. Oppenheim is a past master of the art of constructing ingenious plots and weaving them around attractive characters.—London Morning Post.

By all odds the most successful among the writers of that class of fiction which, for want of a better term, maybe called “mystery stories.”—Ainslee’s Magazine.

E. Phillips Oppenheim has a very admirable gift of telling good stories, thoroughly matured, brilliantly constructed, and convincingly told.—London Times.

Readers of Mr. Oppenheim’s novels may always count on a story of absorbing interest, turning on a complicated plot, worked out with dexterous craftsmanship.—Literary Digest, New York.

We do not stop to inquire into the measure of his art, any more than we inquire into that of Alexandre Dumas, we only realize that here is a benefactor of tired men and women seeking relaxation.—The Independent, New York.