While Flemming was speaking, Lynde unlocked a door at the end of the
hall and ushered him into a sitting-room with three windows, each
opening upon a narrow balcony of its own.

"Sit there, old fellow," said Lynde, wheeling an easy-chair to the
middle window, "and look through my glass at the view before it takes
itself off. It is not often as fine as it is this evening."

In front of the hotel the blue waters of the Rhone swept under the
arches of the Pont des Bergues, to lose themselves in the turbid,
glacier-born Arve, a mile below the town. Between the Pont des Bergues
and the Pont du Montblanc lay the island of Jean Jacques Rousseau,
linked to the quay by a tiny chain bridge. Opposite, upon the right bank
of the Rhone, stretched the handsome facades of tile-roofed buildings,
giving one an idea of the ancient quarter which a closer inspection
dispels; for the streets are crooked and steep, and the houses, except
those lining the quays, squalid. It was not there, however, that the eye
would have lingered. Far away, seen an incredible distance in the
transparent evening atmosphere, Mont Blanc and its massed group of snowy
satellites lifted themselves into the clouds. All those luminous
battlements and turrets and pyramids--the Mole, the Grandes Jorasses,
the Aiguilles du Midi, the Dent du Geant, the Aiguilles d'Argentiere--
were now suffused with a glow so magically delicate that the softest
tint of the blush rose would have seemed harsh and crude in comparison.

"You have to come away from Mont Blanc to see it," said Flemming,
lowering the glass. "When I had my nose against it at Chamouni I didn't
see it at all. It overhung me and smothered me. Old boy"--reaching up
his hand to Lynde who was leaning on the back of the chair--"who would