ernina. The wind was rising again. Instead of sleet it
carried snowflakes, and these did not sting the face nor patter on the
ice. But they clung everywhere, and the sable rocks were taking unto
themselves a new garment.

"_Vorwaertz!_" rang out Stampa's trumpet like call, and Barth leaped
down into the moraine.

CHAPTER X

ON THE GLACIER

Barth, a good man on ice and rock, was not a genius among guides.
Faced by an apparently unscalable rock wall, or lost in a wilderness
of seracs, he would never guess the one way that led to success. But
he was skilled in the technic of his profession, and did not make the
mistake now of subjecting Helen or Spencer to the risk of an ugly
fall. The air temperature had dropped from eighty degrees Fahrenheit
to below freezing point. Rocks that gave safe foothold an hour earlier
were now glazed with an amalgam of sleet and snow. If, in his dull
mind, he wondered why Spencer came next to Helen, rather than Bower or
Stampa,--either of whom would know exactly when to give that timely
aid with the rope that imparts such confidence to the novice,--he said
nothing. Stampa's eye was on him. His pride was up in arms. It
behooved him to press on at just the right pace, and commit no
blunder.

Helen, who had been glad to get back to the moraine during the ascent,
was ready to breathe a sigh of relief when she felt her feet on the
ice again. Those treacherous rocks were affrighting. They bereft her
of trust in her own limbs. She seemed to slip here and there without
power to check herself. She expected at any moment to stumble
helplessly on some cruelly sharp angle of a granite boulder, and find
that she was maimed so badly as to render another step impossible.
More than once she was sensible that the restraining pull on the rope
alone held her from disaster. Her distress did not hinder the growth
of a certain surprise that the American should be so sure footed, so
quick to judge her needs. When by his help a headlong downward plunge
was converted into a harmless slide over the sloping face of a rock,
she half turned.

"I must thank you for that afterward," she said, with a fine effort at
a smile.

"Eyes front, please," was the quiet answer.

Under less strenuous conditions it might have sounded curt; but the
look that met hers robbed the words of their tenseness, and sent the
hot blood tingling in her veins. Bower had never looked at her like
that. Just as some unusually vivid f