A desire to be enveloped in this solitude came over Migwan; to get her
feet off the earth altogether. She half slid and half climbed down the
cliff and walked out on the ice. Before her the grey horizon line
stretched vast and unbroken, and she walked out toward it, lost in
dreaming. Sometimes the floor under her feet was smooth and polished as
a pane of glass, and sometimes it was rough and covered with hummocks
where the water had frozen in the wind. In Migwan's fancy this was not
the lake she was walking on; it was one of the great Swiss glaciers.
Those grey clouds there, standing out against the black ones, they were
the mountains, and she was taking her perilous journey through the
mountain pass. The ice cracked slightly under her feet, but she did not
notice. She was a Swiss guide, taking a party of tourists across the
glacier. Underneath this floor of ice were the bodies of those travelers
who had fallen into the crevices. She was telling the tourists the
stories of the famous disasters and they were shuddering at her tale.
The ice cracked again under her feet, but her mind, soaring in flights
of fancy, took no heed.

Her imagination took another turn. Now she was Mrs. Knollys, in the
famous story, waiting for the body of her husband to be given up by the
glacier. The long years of waiting passed and she stood at the foot of
the glacier watching the miracle unfold before her eyes. The glacier was
making queer cracking noises as it descended, and it sounded as though
there was water underneath it. She could hear it lapping.

C-R-A-C-K! A sound rang out on the still air that startled Migwan like
the report of a pistol, followed immediately by another. She came to her
senses with a rush. With hardly a moment's warning the ice on which she
was standing broke away from the main mass and began to move. Struck