begun amongst the mountains,
and surely, she thought, it had retained to the end something of their
inspiration.

"We first met in the Tyrol, eight years ago. I had crossed a mountain
with a guide--the Glockturm--and came down in the evening to the
Radurschal Thal where I had heard there was an inn. The evening had
turned to rain; but from a shoulder of the mountain I had been able to
look right down the valley and had seen one long low building about four
miles from the foot of the glacier. I walked through the pastures toward
it, and found sitting outside the door in the rain the man who was to be
my friend. The door was locked, and there was no one about the house, nor
was there any other house within miles. My guide, however, went on.
Lattery and I sat out there in the rain for a couple of hours, and then
an old woman with a big umbrella held above her head came down from the
upper pastures, driving some cows in front of her. She told us that no
one had stayed at her inn for fourteen years. But she opened her door,
lit us a great fire, and cooked us eggs and made us coffee. I remember
that night as clearly as if it were yesterday. We sat in front of the
fire with the bedding and the mattresses airing behind us until late into
the night. The rain got worse too. There was a hole in the thatch
overhead, and through it I saw the lightning slash the sky, as I lay in
bed. Very few people ever came up or down that valley; and the next
morning, after the storm, the chamois were close about the inn, on the
grass. We went on together. That was the beginning."

He spoke simply, with a deep quietude of voice. The tobacco glowed and
grew dull in the bowl of his pipe regularly; the darkness hid his face.
But the tenderness, almost the amusement with which he dwelt on the
little insignificant details of that first meeting showed her how very
near to him it was at this moment.

"We went from the Tyrol down to Verona and baked ourselves in the sun
there for a day, under the colonnades, and then came back through the
St. Gotthard to Goeschenen. Do you know the Goeschenen Thal? There is a
semicircle of mountains, the Winterbergen, which closes it in at the
head. We climbed there together for a week, just he and I and no guides.
I remember a rock-ridge there. It was barred by a pinnacle which stood
up from it--'a gendarme,' as they call it. We had to leave the arete and
work out along the face of the pinnacle at right angles to the m