n women climbing.
It was one of the signs of the times that he most deplored. The mother
of the young 'Grundys' countered him at once: In practice she agreed that
they were out of place, but theoretically she could not see why they
should not climb. An American standing near threw all into confusion by
saying he guessed that it might be liable to develop their
understandings. Lennan made for the front door. The moon had just come
up over in the South, and exactly under it he could see their mountain.
What visions he had then! He saw her lying dead, saw himself climbing
down in the moonlight and raising her still-living, but half-frozen, form
from some perilous ledge. Even that was almost better than this
actuality of not knowing where she was, or what had happened. People
passed out into the moonlight, looking curiously at his set face staring
so fixedly. One or two asked him if he were anxious, and he answered:
"Oh no, thanks!" Soon there would have to be a search party. How soon?
He would, he must be, of it! They should not stop him this time. And
suddenly he thought: Ah, it is all because I stayed up there this
afternoon talking to that girl, all because I forgot HER!

And then he heard a stir behind him. There they were, coming down the
passage from a side door--she in front with her alpenstock and
rucksack--smiling. Instinctively he recoiled behind some plants. They
passed. Her sunburned face, with its high cheek-bones and its deep-set
eyes, looked so happy; smiling, tired, triumphant. Somehow he could not
bear it, and when they were gone by he stole out into the wood and threw
himself down in shadow, burying his face, and choking back a horrible dry
sobbing that would keep rising in his throat.

IX

Next day he was happy; for all the afternoon he lay out in the shade of
that same wood at her feet, gazing up through larch-boughs. It was so
wonderful, with nobody but Nature near. Nature so alive, and busy, and
so big!

Coming down from the hut the day before, he had seen a peak that looked
exactly like the figure of a woman with a garment over her head, the
biggest statue in the world; from further down it had become the figure
of a bearded man, with his arm bent over his eyes. Had she seen it? Had
she noticed how all the mountains in moonlight or very early morning took
the shape of beasts? What he wanted most in life was to be able to make
images of beasts and creatures of all sorts, that