s he would sing aloud, but the summits held him silent. As an old
pastor at Zermatt told Mr. Frank, he would come down from a mountain
"like Moses, with his face illumined."

He started on his third visit to Switzerland early in July: in the
second week in August Miss Bracy and Mr. Frank were to join him at
Chamounix, and thence the three would make a tour together. He started
in the highest spirits, and halted at the gate to wave his ice-axe
defiantly. . . .

VI.

The clergyman who ministered to the little tin English Church boarded at
the big hotel, which kept a bedroom and a sitting-room at his disposal.
They faced north from the back of the building, which stood against the
mountain-side; but the sitting-room had a second window at the corner of
the block, and from this the eye went up over a plantation of dark firs
to the white snowfields of the Col and the dark jagged wall of the
Aiguille du Geant--distant, yet as clear as if stencilled against the
blue heaven. It was a delectable vision; but the clergyman, being
short-sighted as a mole, had never seen it. He wore spectacles with a
line running horizontally across them, and through these he peered at
Mr. Frank and Miss Bracy as if uncertain of their distance.

Mr. Frank, in a suit of black, sat at the little round table in the
centre of the room, pressing his finger-tips into the soft nap of a
gaudy French table-cloth. Miss Bracy stood by the window with her back
to the room, but she was listening. She too wore black. The fourth
person, at the little clergyman's elbow, was Christian the guide.
It was he who spoke, while Mr. Frank dug his fingers deeper, and the
clergyman nodded at every pause sympathetically, and both kept their
eyes on the table-cloth, the pink and crimson roses of which on their
background of buff and maroon were to one a blur only, to the other a
pattern bitten on his brain.

"It must have been between noon and one o'clock"--the guide was saying--
"when we crossed the Col and began on the rocks. I was leading, of
course; the Herr next, and Michel"--this was their porter--"behind.
We had halted and lunched at the foot of the rocks. They were nasty,
with a coating, for the most part, of thin ice which we must knock away;
but not really dangerous. The Herr was silent; not singing--he had been
singing and laughing all through the morning--but in high spirits.
He kept his breath now for business. I never knew him fatigued; and