itzerland and climb mountains."

Waram _was_ nauseated. They went to Salvan and there a curious thing
happened.

They were walking one afternoon along the road to Martigny. The valley
was full of shadows like a deep green cup of purple wine. High above
them the mountains were tipped with flame. Grimshaw walked slowly--he
was a man of great physical laziness--slashing his cane at the
tasselled tips of the crowding larches. Once, when a herd of little
goats trotted by, he stood aside and laughed uproariously, and the
goatherd's dog, bristling, snapped in passing at his legs.

Waram was silent, full of bitterness and disgust. They went on again,
and well down the springlike coils of the descent of Martigny they
came upon the body of a man--one of those wandering vendors of
pocket-knives and key-rings, scissors and cheap watches. He lay on his
back on a low bank by the roadside. His hat had rolled off into a pool
of muddy water. Doctor Waram saw, as he bent down to stare at the
face, that the fellow looked like Grimshaw. Not exactly, of course.
The nose was coarser--it had not that Wellington spring at the bridge,
nor the curved nostrils. But it might have been a dirty, unshaven,
dead Grimshaw lying there. Waram told me that he felt a shock of
gratification before he heard the poet's voice behind him: "What's
this? A drunkard?" He shook his head and opened the dead man's shirt
to feel for any possible flutter of life in the heart. There was none.
And he thought: "If this were only Grimshaw! If the whole miserable
business were only done with."

"By Jove!" Grimshaw said. "The chap looks like me! I thought I was the
ugliest man in the world. I know better... D'you suppose he's German,
or Lombardian? His hands are warm. He must have been alive when the
goatherd passed just now. Nothing you can do?"

Waram stayed where he was, on his knees. He tore his eyes away from
the grotesque dead face and fixed them on Grimshaw. He told me that
the force of his desire must have spoken in that look because Grimshaw
started and stepped back a pace, gripping his cane. Then he laughed.
"Why not?" he said. "Let this be me. And I'll go on, with that
clanking hardware store around my neck. It can be done, can't it?
Better for you and for Dagmar. I'm not being philanthropic. I'm
looking, not for a reprieve, but for release. No one knows this fellow
in Salvan--he probably came up from the Rhone and was on his way to
Chamonix. What d'you thin