. We saw it glimmering away below us. It might end
in a crevasse and a glacier for all we knew, and we debated whether we
should be prudent or chance it. We chanced the crevasse. We sat down and
glissaded in the dark with only the vaguest idea where we should end.
Altogether we had very good times, he and I. Well, they have come to an
end on the Glacier des Nantillons."

Chayne became silent; Sylvia Thesiger sat at his side and did not
interrupt. In front of them the pastures slid away into darkness. Only a
few small clear lights shining in the chalets told them there were other
people awake in the world. Except for the reverberation of the torrent
deep in the gorge at their right, no sound at all broke the deep silence.
Chayne knocked the ashes from his pipe.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I have been talking to you about one whom
you never knew. You were so quiet that I seemed to be merely remembering
to myself."

"I was so quiet," Sylvia explained, "because I wished you to go on. I was
very glad to hear you. It was all new and strange and very pleasant to
me--this story of your friendship. As strange and pleasant as this cool,
quiet night here, a long way from the hotels and the noise, on the edge
of the snow. For I have heard little of such friendships and I have seen
still less."

Chayne's thoughts were suddenly turned from his dead friend to this, the
living companion at his side. There was something rather sad and pitiful
in the tone of her voice, no less than in the words she used. She spoke
with so much humility. He was aware with a kind of shock, that here was a
woman, not a child. He turned his eyes to her, as he had turned his
thoughts. He could see dimly the profile of her face. It was still as the
night itself. She was looking straight in front of her into the darkness.
He pondered upon her life and how she bore with it, and how she had kept
herself unspoiled by its associations. Of the saving grace of her dreams
he knew nothing. But the picture of her mother was vivid to his eyes, the
outlawed mother, shunned instinctively by the women, noisy and shrill,
and making her companions of the would-be fashionable loiterers and the
half-pay officers run to seed. That she bore it ill her last words had
shown him. They had thrown a stray ray of light upon a dark place which
seemed a place of not much happiness.

"I am very glad that you are here to-night," he said. "It has been kind
of you to listen. I rathe