s, and look
out upon it half contemptuously. Then they cross it--carefully, they
have enough respect left for that--with their cunningly nailed shoes
and a rope; an hour or two they dally with it, till at last, being
hungry and cold, they walk to the inn for supper. At supper they tell
stories of their prowess, pay money to the guides who have protected
them, and fall asleep after tea with weariness. Meantime, the darkness
falls outside; but the white presence of the glacier breaks the night,
and strange shapes unseen of men dance in its ashen hollows. It is
so old that the realms of death and life conflict; change is on the
surface, but immortality broods in the deeper places. The moon rises
and sinks; the glacier moves silently, like a timepiece marking the
centuries, grooving the record of its being on the world itself,--a
feature to be read and studied by far-off generations of some other
world. The glacier has a light of its own, and gleams to stars above,
and the great Glockner mountain flings his shadow of the planets in
its face.

Mrs. Knollys was a young English bride, sunny-haired, hopeful-eyed,
with lips that parted to make you love them,--parted before they
smiled, and all the soft regions of her face broke into attendant
dimples. And then, lest you should think it meant for you, she looked
quickly up to "Charles," as she would then call him even to strangers,
and Charles looked down to her. Charles was a short foot taller, with
much the same hair and eyes, thick flossy whiskers, broad shoulders,
and a bass voice. This was in the days before political economy cut
Hymen's wings. Charles, like Mary, had little money, but great hopes;
and he was clerk in a government office, with a friendly impression of
everybody and much trust in himself. And old Harry Colquhoun, his
chief, had given them six weeks to go to Switzerland and be happy in,
all in celebration of Charles Knollys's majority and marriage to his
young wife. So they had both forgotten heaven for the nonce, having a
passable substitute; but the powers divine overlooked them pleasantly
and forgave it. And even the phlegmatic driver of their _Einspaenner_
looked back from the corner of his eye at the _schoene Englaenderin_,
and compared her mentally with the far-famed beauty of the Koenigssee.
So they rattled on in their curious conveyance, with the pole in the
middle and the one horse out on one side, and still found more beauty
in each other's eyes tha