hers the fate he had himself suffered!

"I dropped the match I was holding. I tightened my clasp convulsively
about Fidele. Thank God she, at any rate, was blind to this horror within
a horror!

"All at once--was it the start I had given, or the natural process of
dissolution beneath our feet?--we were moving again. Swift--swifter!
Fidele uttered a little moaning cry. The rubbish of ice crashed below us,
and we sank through.

"I knew nothing, then, but that we were in water--that we had fallen from
a little height, and were being hurried along. The torrent, now deep, now
so shallow that my feet scraped its bed, gushed in my ears and blinded my
eyes.

"Still I hugged Fidele, and I could feel by her returning grasp that she
lived. The water was not unbearably cold as yet. The air that came
through cracks and crevasses had not force to overcome the under warmth.

"I felt something slide against me--clutched and held on. It was a brave
pine log. Could I recover it at this date I would convert it into a
flagstaff for the tricolour. It was our raft, our refuge; and it carried
us to safety.

"I cannot give the extravagant processes of that long journey. It was all
a rushing, swirling dream--a mad race of mystery and sublimity, to
which the only conscious periods were wild, flitting glimpses of
wonderful ice arabesques, caught momentarily as we passed under fissures
that let the light of day through dimly.

"Gradually a ghostly radiance grew to encompass us; and by a like
gradation the water waxed intensely cold. Hope then was blazing in our
hearts; but this new deathliness went nigh to quench it altogether. Yet,
had we guessed the reason, we could have foregone the despair. For, in
truth, we were approaching that shallower terrace of the glacier beyond
the fall, through which the light could force some weak passage, and the
air make itself felt, blowing upon the beds of ice.

"Well, we survived; and still we survive. My faith, what a couple!
Sublimity would have none of us. The glacier rejected souls so
commonplace as not to be properly impressed by its inexorability.

"This, then, was the end. We swept into a huge cavern of ice--through
it--beyond it, into the green valley and the world that we love. And
there, where the torrent splits up into a score of insignificant streams,
we grounded and crawled to dry land and sat down and laughed.

"Yes, we could do it--we could laugh. Is that not bathos? But Fidele and
I h