dead to the world. I saw a single
picture--an inn in a snowy valley (I saw it as a small place like
Peter's cottage), a solitary girl, that smiling devil who had left me,
and then the unknown terror of the Underground Railway. I think my
courage went for a bit, and I cried with feebleness and rage. The
hammer in my forehead had stopped for it only beat when I was angry in
action. Now that I lay trapped, the manhood had slipped out of my
joints, and if Ivery had still been in the doorway, I think I would
have whined for mercy. I would have offered him all the knowledge I had
in the world if he had promised to leave Mary alone.

Happily he wasn't there, and there was no witness of my cowardice.
Happily, too, it is just as difficult to be a coward for long as to be
a hero. It was Blenkiron's phrase about Mary that pulled me
together--'She can't scare and she can't soil'. No, by heavens, she
couldn't. I could trust my lady far better than I could trust myself. I
was still sick with anxiety, but I was getting a pull on myself. I was
done in, but Ivery would get no triumph out of me. Either I would go
under the ice, or I would find a chance of putting a bullet through my
head before I crossed the frontier. If I could do nothing else I could
perish decently ... And then I laughed, and I knew I was past the
worst. What made me laugh was the thought of Peter. I had been pitying
him an hour ago for having only one leg, but now he was abroad in the
living, breathing world with years before him, and I lay in the depths,
limbless and lifeless, with my number up.

I began to muse on the cold water under the ice where I could go if I
wanted. I did not think that I would take that road, for a man's
chances are not gone till he is stone dead, but I was glad the way
existed ... And then I looked at the wall in front of me, and, very far
up, I saw a small square window.

The stars had been clouded when I entered that accursed house, but the
mist must have cleared. I saw my old friend Orion, the hunter's star,
looking through the bars. And that suddenly made me think.

Peter and I had watched them by night, and I knew the place of all the
chief constellations in relation to the St Anton valley. I believed
that I was in a room on the lake side of the Pink Chalet: I must be, if
Ivery had spoken the truth. But if so, I could not conceivably see
Orion from its window ... There was no other possible conclusion, I
must be in a room on the ea