dy be too late. There might be publicity, inquiries, and for
Garratt Skinner ruin, and worse than ruin. Would Sylvia let her lover
share the dishonor of her name? He knew very surely she would not.
Therefore he would have the marriage.

"By the way," he said, as he draped her cloak about her shoulders. "You
have that telegram from Jarvice?"

"Yes."

"That's good," he said. "It might be useful."

CHAPTER XXII

REVAILLOUD REVISITED

Never that familiar journey across France seemed to Chayne so slow. Would
he be in time? Would he arrive too late? The throb of the wheels beat out
the questions in a perpetual rhythm and gave him no answer. The words of
Jarvice's telegram were ever present in his mind, and grew more sinister,
the more he thought upon them. "What are you waiting for? Hurry up!"
Once, when the train stopped over long as it seemed to him he muttered
the words aloud and then glanced in alarm at his wife, lest perchance she
had overheard them. But she had not. She was remembering her former
journey along this very road. Then it had been night; now it was day.
Then she had been used to seek respite from her life in the shelter of
her dreams. Now the dreams were of no use, since what was real made them
by comparison so pale and thin. The blood ran strong and joyous in her
veins to-day; and looking at her, Chayne sent up his prayers that they
might not arrive in Chamonix too late. To him as to her Walter Hine was a
mere puppet, a thing without importance--so long as he lived. But he must
live. Dead, he threatened ruin and dishonor, and since from the beginning
Sylvia and he had shared--for so she would have it--had shared in the
effort to save this life, it would be well for them, he thought that they
should not fail.

The long hot day drew to an end, and at last from the platform at the end
of the electric train they saw the snow-fields lift toward the soaring
peaks, and the peaks purple with the after glow stand solitary and
beautiful against the evening sky.

"At last!" said Sylvia, with a catch in her breath, and the clasp of her
hand tightened upon her husband's arm. But Chayne was remembering certain
words once spoken to him in a garden of Dorsetshire, by a man who lay
idly in a hammock and stared up between the leaves. "On the most sunny
day, the mountains hold in their recesses mystery and death."

"You know where your father is staying?" Chayne asked.

"He wrote from the Hotel de l'Arve,"