vision of them sitting there
praying and listening; he had no desire to see them more directly. There
were a couple of men who hung about the inn as guides for the ascent of
the Titlis; Rowland sent each of them forth in a different direction,
to ask the news of Roderick at every chalet door within a morning's
walk. Then he called Sam Singleton, whose peregrinations had made him an
excellent mountaineer, and whose zeal and sympathy were now unbounded,
and the two started together on a voyage of research. By the time
they had lost sight of the inn, Rowland was obliged to confess that,
decidedly, Roderick had had time to come back.

He wandered about for several hours, but he found only the sunny
stillness of the mountain-sides. Before long he parted company with
Singleton, who, to his suggestion that separation would multiply their
resources, assented with a silent, frightened look which reflected too
vividly his own rapidly-dawning thought. The day was magnificent; the
sun was everywhere; the storm had lashed the lower slopes into a deeper
flush of autumnal color, and the snow-peaks reared themselves against
the near horizon in glaring blocks and dazzling spires. Rowland made his
way to several chalets, but most of them were empty. He thumped at their
low, foul doors with a kind of nervous, savage anger; he challenged the
stupid silence to tell him something about his friend. Some of these
places had evidently not been open in months. The silence everywhere
was horrible; it seemed to mock at his impatience and to be a conscious
symbol of calamity. In the midst of it, at the door of one of the
chalets, quite alone, sat a hideous cretin, who grinned at Rowland over
his goitre when, hardly knowing what he did, he questioned him. The
creature's family was scattered on the mountain-sides; he could give
Rowland no help to find them. Rowland climbed into many awkward
places, and skirted, intently and peeringly, many an ugly chasm and
steep-dropping ledge. But the sun, as I have said, was everywhere; it
illumined the deep places over which, not knowing where to turn next,
he halted and lingered, and showed him nothing but the stony Alpine
void--nothing so human even as death. At noon he paused in his quest and
sat down on a stone; the conviction was pressing upon him that the worst
that was now possible was true. He suspended his search; he was afraid
to go on. He sat there for an hour, sick to the depths of his soul.
Without