separate attacks upon that peak. He stared
from the pages of the volume--Gabriel Strood. Something of his great
reach of limb, of his activity, of his endurance, she was able to
realize. Moreover he had a particular blemish which gave to him a
particular interest in her eyes, for it would have deterred most men
altogether from his pursuit and it greatly hampered him. And yet in
spite of it, he had apparently for some seasons stood prominent in the
Alpine fraternity. Gabriel Strood was afflicted with a weakness in the
muscles of one thigh. Sylvia, according to her custom, began to picture
him, began to talk with him.

She wondered whether he was glad to have reached that summit, or whether
he was not on the whole rather sorry--sorry for having lost out of his
life a great and never-flagging interest. She looked through the
subsequent papers in the volume, but could find no further mention of his
name. She perplexed her fancies that morning. She speculated whether
having made this climb he had stopped and climbed no more; or whether he
might not get out of this very train on to the platform at Chamonix. But
as the train slowed down near to Annemasse, she remembered that the
exploit of which she had read had taken place more than twenty years ago.

CHAPTER II

INTRODUCES ONE OF STROOD'S SUCCESSORS

But though Gabriel Strood occupied no seat in that train, one of his
successors was traveling by it to Chamonix after an absence of four
years. Of those four years Captain Chayne had passed the last two among
the coal-stacks of Aden, with the yellow land of Arabia at his back,
longing each day for this particular morning, and keeping his body lithe
and strong against its coming. He left the train at Annemasse, and
crossing the rails to the buffet, sat down at the table next to that
which Mrs. Thesiger and her daughter already occupied.

He glanced at them, placed them in their category, and looked away,
utterly uninterested. They belonged to the great class of the continental
wanderers, people of whom little is known and everything
suspected--people with no kinsfolk, who flit from hotel to hotel and
gather about them for a season the knowing middle-aged men and the
ignorant young ones, and perhaps here and there an unwary woman deceived
by the more than fashionable cut of their clothes. The mother he put down
as nearer forty than thirty, and engaged in a struggle against odds to
look nearer twenty than thirty. The