It was true that for two nights and a day the two men must have already hung upon their ledge, that a third night was to follow. Still such endurance had been known in the annals of the Alps, and Lattery was a hard strong man.

A girl came from the chalet and told him that his dinner was ready. Chayne forced himself to eat and stepped out again on to the platform. A door opened and closed behind him. Michel Revailloud came from the guides' quarters at the end of the chalet and stood beside him in the darkness, saying nothing since sympathy taught him to be silent, and when he moved moving with great gentleness.

"I am glad, Michel, that we waited here since we had to wait," said Chayne.

"This chalet is new to you, monsieur. It has been built while you were away."

"Yes. And therefore it has no associations, and no memories. Its bare whitewashed walls have no stories to tell me of cheery nights on the eve of a new climb when he and I sat together for a while and talked eagerly of the prospects of to-morrow."

The words ceased. Chayne leaned his elbows on the wooden rail. The mists in the valley below had been swept away; overhead the stars shone out of an ebony sky very bright as on some clear winter night of frost, and of all that gigantic amphitheater of mountains which circled behind them from right to left there was hardly a hint. Perhaps here some extra cube of darkness showed where a pinnacle soared, or there a vague whiteness glimmered where a high glacier hung against the cliff, but for the rest the darkness hid the mountains. A cold wind blew out of the East and Chayne shivered.

"You are cold, monsieur?" said Michel. "It is your first night."

"No, I am not cold," Chayne replied, in a low and quiet voice. "But I am thinking it will be deadly cold up there in the darkness on the rocks of the Blaitiere."

Michel answered him in the same quiet voice. On that broad open plateau both men spoke indeed as though they were in a sick chamber.

"While you were away, monsieur, three men without food sat through a night on a steep ice-sheltered ice-slope behind us, high up on the Aiguille du Plan, as high up as the rocks of the Blaitiere. And not one of them came to any harm."

"I know. I read of it," said Chayne, but he gathered little comfort from the argument.

Michel fumbled in his pocket and drew out a pipe. "You do not smoke any more?" he asked. "It is a good thing to smoke."

"I had forgotten," said Chayne.

He filled his pipe and then took a fuse from his match-box.

"No, don't waste it," cried Michel quickly before he could strike it. "I remember your fuses, monsieur."

Michel struck a sulphur match and held it as it spluttered, and frizzled, in the hollow of his great hands. The flame burnt up. He held it first to Chayne's pipe-bowl and then to his own; and for a moment his face was lit with the red glow. Its age thus revealed, and framed in the darkness, shocked Chayne, even at this moment, more than it had done on the platform at Chamonix. Not merely were its deep lines shown up, but all the old humor and alertness had gone. The face had grown mask-like and spiritless. Then the match went out.

Chayne leaned upon the rail and looked downward. A long way below him, in the clear darkness of the valley the lights of Chamonix shone bright and very small. Chayne had never seen them before so straight beneath him. As he looked he began to notice them; as he noticed them, more and more they took a definite shape. He rose upright, and pointing downward with one hand he said in a whisper, a whisper of awe—

"Do you see, Michel? Do you see?"

The great main thoroughfare ran in a straight line eastward through the town, and, across it, intersecting it at the little square where the guides gather of an evening, lay the other broad straight road from the church across the river. Along those two roads the lights burned most brightly, and thus there had emerged before Chayne's eyes a great golden cross. It grew clearer and clearer as he looked; he looked away and then back again, and now it leapt to view, he could not hide it from his sight, a great cross of light lying upon the dark bosom of the valley.

"Do you see, Michel?"

"Yes." The answer came back very steadily. "But so it was last night and last year. Those three men on the Plan had it before their eyes all night. It is no sign of disaster." For a moment he was silent, and then he added timidly: "If you look for a sign, monsieur, there is a better one."

Chayne turned toward Michel in the darkness rather quickly.

"As we set out from the hotel," Michel continued, "there was a young girl upon the steps with a very sweet and gentle face. She spoke to you, monsieur. No doubt she told you that her prayers would be with you to-night."

"No, Michel," Chayne replied, and though the darkness hid his face, Michel knew that he smiled. "She did not promise me her prayers. She simply said: 'I am sorry.'"

Michel Revailloud was silent for a little while, and when he spoke again, he spoke very wistfully. One might almost have said that there was a note of envy in his voice.

"Well, that is still something, monsieur. You are very lonely to-night, is it not so? You came back here after many years, eager with hopes and plans and not thinking at all of disappointments. And the disappointments have come, and the hopes are all fallen. Is not that so, too? Well, it is something, monsieur—I, who am lonely too, and an old man besides, so that I cannot mend my loneliness, I tell you—it is something that there is a young girl down there with a sweet and gentle face who is sorry for you, who perhaps is looking up from among those lights to where we stand in the darkness at this moment."

But it seemed that Chayne did not hear, or, if he heard, that he paid no heed. And Michel, knocking the tobacco from his pipe, said:

"You will do well to sleep. We may have a long day before us"; and he walked away to the guides' quarters.

But Chayne could not sleep; hope and doubt fought too strongly within him, wrestling for the life of his friend. At twelve o'clock Michel knocked upon his door. Chayne got up from his bed at once, drew on his boots, and breakfasted. At half past the rescue party set out, following a rough path through a wilderness of boulders by the light of a lantern. It was still dark when they came to the edge of the glacier, and they sat down and waited. In a little while the sky broke in the East, a twilight dimly revealed the hills, Michel blew out the lantern, the blurred figures of the guides took shape and outline, and silently the morning dawned upon the world.

The guides moved on to the glacier and spread over it, ascending as they searched.

"You see, monsieur, there is very little snow this year," said Michel, chipping steps so that he and Chayne might round the corner of a wide crevasse.

"Yes, but it does not follow that he slipped," said Chayne, hotly, for he was beginning to resent that explanation as an imputation against his friend.

Slowly the party moved upward over the great slope of ice into the recess, looking for steps abruptly ending above a crevasse or for signs of an avalanche. They came level with the lower end of a long rib of rock which crops out from the ice and lengthwise bisects the glacier. Here the search ended for a while. The rib of rocks is the natural path, and the guides climbed it quickly. They came to the upper glacier and spread out once more, roped in couples. They were now well within the great amphitheater. On their left