been lived. She was now
like a woman of another world; it seemed another world in which her
fair hair had twined about her husband's fingers, and she and Charles
had stood upon the evening mountain, and looked in one another's eyes.
That was the world of her wedding-days, but it seemed more like a
world she had left when born on earth. And now he was coming back to
her in this. Meantime the great Pasterzen glacier had moved on,
marking only the centuries; the men upon its borders had seen no
change; the same great waves lifted their snowy heads upon its
surface; the same crevasse still was where he had fallen. At night,
the moonbeams, falling, still shivered off its glassy face; its pale
presence filled the night, and immortality lay brooding in its
hollows.

Friends were with Mrs. Knollys, but she left them at the inn. One old
guide remembered her, and asked to bear her company. He went with her
in the morning, and sat a few yards from her, waiting. In the
afternoon she went alone. He would not have credited you, had you told
him that the glacier moved. He thought it but an Englishwoman's fancy,
but he waited with her. Himself had never forgotten that old day. And
Mrs. Knollys sat there silently, searching the clear depths of the
ice, that she might find her husband.

One night she saw a ghost. The latest beam of the sun, falling on a
mountain opposite, had shone back into the ice-cavern; and seemingly
deep within, in the grave azure light, she fancied she saw a face
turned toward her. She even thought she saw Charles's yellow hair, and
the self-same smile his lips had worn when he bent down to her before
he fell. It could be but a fancy. She went home, and was silent with
her friends about what had happened. In the moonlight she went back,
and again the next morning before dawn. She told no one of her going;
but the old guide met her at the door, and walked silently behind her.
She had slept, the glacier ever present in her dreams.

The sun had not yet risen when she came; and she sat a long time in
the cavern, listening to the murmur of the river, flowing under the
glacier at her feet. Slowly the dawn began, and again she seemed to
see the shimmer of a face--such a face as one sees in the coals of a
dying fire. Then the full sun came over the eastern mountain, and the
guide heard a woman's cry. There before her was Charles Knollys! The
face seemed hardly pale; and there was the same faint smile--a smile
like her