direction from the day before.

He could not bear to see the English girl again, and all the next day
was absent from the inn. For a month he stopped at Heiligenblut, and
busied himself with his instruments. The guides of the place greeted
him coldly every day, as they started on their glacier excursions or
their chamois hunting. But none the less did Zimmermann return the
following summer, and work upon his great essay in refutation of the
Spluethner.

Mrs. Knollys went back to the little cottage in Surrey, and lived
there. The chests and cases she brought back lay unopened in the
store-room; the little rooms of the cottage that was to be their home
remained bare and unadorned, as Charles had seen them last. She could
not bring herself to alter them now. What she had looked forward to do
with him she had no strength to do alone. She rarely went out. There
was no place where she could go to think of him. He was gone; gone
from England, gone from the very surface of the earth. If he had only
been buried in some quiet English churchyard, she thought,--some green
place lying open to the sun, where she could go and scatter flowers on
his grave, where she could sit and look forward amid her tears to the
time when she should lie side by side with him,--they would then be
separated for her short life alone. Now it seemed to her that they
were far apart forever.

But late the next summer she had a letter from the place. It was from
Dr. Zimmermann. There is no need here to trace the quaint German
phrases, the formalism, the cold terms of science in which he made his
meaning plain. It spoke of erosion; of the movement of the summer; of
the action of the under-waters on the ice. And it told her, with
tender sympathy oddly blended with the pride of scientific success,
that he had given a year's most careful study to the place; with all
his instruments of measurement he had tested the relentless glacier's
flow; and it closed by assuring her that her husband might yet be
found--in five and forty years. In five and forty years--the poor
professor staked his scientific reputation on the fact--in five and
forty years she might return, and the glacier would give up its dead.

This letter made Mrs. Knollys happier. It made her willing to live; it
made her almost long to live until old age--that her Charles's body
might be given back. She took heart to beautify her little home. The
trifling articles she had bought with Charles were no