lver high above a blue corner of
the Lake of Geneva, formed one memorable date. Once, too, in the
winter-time, as the Rome express stopped at three o'clock in the morning
at the frontier on the Italian side of the Mont Cenis tunnel, she had
carefully lifted the blind on the right-hand side of the sleeping
compartment and had seen a great wall of mountains tower up in a clear
frosty moonlight from great buttresses of black rock to delicate
pinnacles of ice soaring infinite miles away into a cloudless sky of
blue. She had come near to tears that night as she looked from the
window; such a tumult of vague longings rushed suddenly in upon her and
uplifted her. She was made aware of dim uncomprehended thoughts stirring
in the depths of her being, and her soul was drawn upward to those
glittering spires, as to enchanted magnets. Ever afterward Sylvia looked
forward, through weeks, to those few moments in her mother's annual
itinerary, and prayed with all her heart that the night might be clear of
mist and rain.

She sat now at the window with no thought of Trouville or their hurried
flight. With each throb of the carriage-wheels the train flashed nearer
to Chamonix. She opened the book which lay upon her lap--the book in
which she had been so interested when Monsieur de Camours and his mother
passed her by. It was a volume of the "Alpine Journal," more than twenty
years old, and she could not open it but some exploit of the pioneers
took her eyes, some history of a first ascent of an unclimbed peak. Such
a history she read now. She was engrossed in it, and yet at times a
little frown of annoyance wrinkled her forehead. She gave an explanation
of her annoyance; for once she exclaimed half aloud, "Oh, if only he
wouldn't be so _funny_!" The author was indeed being very funny, and to
her thinking never so funny as when the narrative should have been most
engrossing. She was reading the account of the first ascent of an
aiguille in the Chamonix district, held by guides to be impossible and
conquered at last by a party of amateurs. In spite of its humor Sylvia
Thesiger was thrilled by it. She envied the three men who had taken part
in that ascent, envied them their courage, their comradeship, their
bivouacs in the open air beside glowing fires, on some high shelf of
rock above the snows. But most of all her imagination was touched by the
leader of that expedition, the man who sometimes alone, sometimes in
company, had made sixteen