me quiet voice. On that broad open plateau
both men spoke indeed as though they were in a sick chamber.

"While you were away, monsieur, three men without food sat through a
night on a steep ice-sheltered ice-slope behind us, high up on the
Aiguille du Plan, as high up as the rocks of the Blaitiere. And not one
of them came to any harm."

"I know. I read of it," said Chayne, but he gathered little comfort from
the argument.

Michel fumbled in his pocket and drew out a pipe. "You do not smoke any
more?" he asked. "It is a good thing to smoke."

"I had forgotten," said Chayne.

He filled his pipe and then took a fuse from his match-box.

"No, don't waste it," cried Michel quickly before he could strike it. "I
remember your fuses, monsieur."

Michel struck a sulphur match and held it as it spluttered, and frizzled,
in the hollow of his great hands. The flame burnt up. He held it first to
Chayne's pipe-bowl and then to his own; and for a moment his face was lit
with the red glow. Its age thus revealed, and framed in the darkness,
shocked Chayne, even at this moment, more than it had done on the
platform at Chamonix. Not merely were its deep lines shown up, but all
the old humor and alertness had gone. The face had grown mask-like and
spiritless. Then the match went out.

Chayne leaned upon the rail and looked downward. A long way below him, in
the clear darkness of the valley the lights of Chamonix shone bright and
very small. Chayne had never seen them before so straight beneath him. As
he looked he began to notice them; as he noticed them, more and more they
took a definite shape. He rose upright, and pointing downward with one
hand he said in a whisper, a whisper of awe--

"Do you see, Michel? Do you see?"

The great main thoroughfare ran in a straight line eastward through the
town, and, across it, intersecting it at the little square where the
guides gather of an evening, lay the other broad straight road from the
church across the river. Along those two roads the lights burned most
brightly, and thus there had emerged before Chayne's eyes a great golden
cross. It grew clearer and clearer as he looked; he looked away and then
back again, and now it leapt to view, he could not hide it from his
sight, a great cross of light lying upon the dark bosom of the valley.

"Do you see, Michel?"

"Yes." The answer came back very steadily. "But so it was last night
and last year. Those three men on the Plan had it be