t
first.

"It depends on the guides. They are not the first to turn back, as a
rule; but they like wind and mist even less than we do. The guides know
what wind and mist mean."

I now understood the special disadvantages of the day and realised the
obvious dangers. I could only hope that either Bob Evers or his guides
had shown the one kind of courage required by the occasion, the moral
courage of turning back. But I was not at all sure of Bob. His stimulus
was not that of the single-minded, level-headed mountaineer; in his
romantic exaltation he was capable of hailing the very perils as so many
more means of grace in the sight of Mrs. Lascelles; yet without doubt he
would have repudiated any such incentive, and that in all the sincerity
of his simple heart. He did not know himself as I knew him.

My fears were soon confirmed. Returning to the glass veranda, after the
stock breakfast of the Swiss hotel, with its horseshoe rolls and
fabricated honey, I found the telescope the centre of an ominous crowd,
on whose fringe hovered my new friend the mountaineer.

"We were wrong," he muttered to me. "Some fools are up there, after
all."

"How many?" I asked quickly.

"I don't know. There's no getting near the telescope now, and won't be
till the clouds blot them out altogether."

I looked out at the Matterhorn. The loincloth of cloud had shaken itself
out into a flowing robe, from which only the brown skull of the mountain
protruded in its white skull-cap.

"There are three of them," announced a nasal voice from the heart of the
little crowd. "A great long chap and two guides."

"He can't possibly know that," remarked the mountaineer to me, "but
let's hope it is so."

"They're as plain as pike-staffs," continued Quinby, whose bent blond
head I now distinguished, as he occupied the congenial post of Sister
Anne. "They seem stuck.... No, they're getting up on to the snow-slope,
and the front man's cutting steps."

"Then they're all right for the present," said the mountaineer. "It's
the getting down that's ticklish."

"You can see the rope blowing about between them ... what a wind there
must be ... it's bent out taut like a bow, you can see it against the
snow, and they're bending themselves more than forty-five degrees to
meet it."

"All very well going _up_," murmured the mountaineer: there was a
sinister innuendo in the curt comments of the practical man.

I turned into the hall. It, however, was quite des