e might get his movement order any day. Another spoke of my little
cousin over the hills, and said that she hoped soon to be going to a
place called Santa Chiara in the Val Saluzzana. I got out the map in a
hurry and measured the distance from there to St Anton and pored over
the two roads thither--the short one by the Staub Pass and the long one
by the Marjolana. These letters made me think that things were nearing
a climax, but still no instructions came. I had nothing to report in my
own messages, I had discovered nothing in the Pink Chalet but idle
servants, I was not even sure if the Pink Chalet were not a harmless
villa, and I hadn't come within a thousand miles of finding Chelius.
All my desire to imitate Peter's stoicism didn't prevent me from
getting occasionally rattled and despondent.

The one thing I could do was to keep fit, for I had a notion I might
soon want all my bodily strength. I had to keep up my pretence of
lameness in the daytime, so I used to take my exercise at night. I
would sleep in the afternoon, when Peter had his siesta, and then about
ten in the evening, after putting him to bed, I would slip out-of-doors
and go for a four or five hours' tramp. Wonderful were those midnight
wanderings. I pushed up through the snow-laden pines to the ridges
where the snow lay in great wreaths and scallops, till I stood on a
crest with a frozen world at my feet and above me a host of glittering
stars. Once on a night of full moon I reached the glacier at the valley
head, scrambled up the moraine to where the ice began, and peered
fearfully into the spectral crevasses. At such hours I had the earth to
myself, for there was not a sound except the slipping of a burden of
snow from the trees or the crack and rustle which reminded me that a
glacier was a moving river. The war seemed very far away, and I felt
the littleness of our human struggles, till I thought of Peter turning
from side to side to find ease in the cottage far below me. Then I
realized that the spirit of man was the greatest thing in this spacious
world ... I would get back about three or four, have a bath in the
water which had been warming in my absence, and creep into bed, almost
ashamed of having two sound legs, when a better man a yard away had but
one.

Oddly enough at these hours there seemed more life in the Pink Chalet
than by day. Once, tramping across the lake long after midnight, I saw
lights in the lake-front in windows which for or