farther dependency. Usually they had climbed together for six weeks,
although there were red-letter years when the six weeks were extended to
eight, six weeks during which they lived for the most part on the high
level of the glaciers, sleeping in huts, or mountain inns, or beneath
the stars, and coming down only for a few hours now and then into the
valley towns. _Vorwärts_! The months of their comradeship seemed to him
epitomized in the word. The joy and inspiration of many a hard climb
came back, made bitter with regret for things very pleasant and now done
with forever. Nights on some high ledge, sheltered with rocks and set in
the pale glimmer of snow-fields, with a fire of brushwood lighting up
the faces of well-loved comrades; half hours passed in rock chimneys
wedged overhead by a boulder, or in snow-gullies beneath a bulge of ice,
when one man struggled above, out of sight, and the rest of the party
crouched below with what security it might waiting for the cheery cry,
"_Es geht. Vorwärts_!"; the last scramble to the summit of a virgin
peak; the swift glissade down the final snow-slopes in the dusk of the
evening with the lights of the village twinkling below; his memories
tramped by him fast and always in the heart of them his friend's face
shone before his eyes. Chayne stood for a moment dazed and bewildered.
There rose up in his mind that first helpless question of distress,
"Why?" and while he stood, his face puzzled and greatly troubled, there
fell upon his ears from close at hand a simple message of sympathy
uttered in a whisper gentle but distinct:

"I am very sorry."

Chayne looked up. It was the overdressed girl of the Annemasse buffet,
the girl who had seemed to understand then, who seemed to understand now.
He raised his hat to her with a sense of gratitude. Then he followed the
guides and went up among the trees toward the Glacier des Nantillons.