eaming
into his eyes. He had no feeling now but wonder whether he would get
to the top before he dropped, exhausted. He thought he would die of
the beating of his heart; but it was better to die than to stop and be
beaten by a few yards. He stumbled up at last on to the little plateau
at the top. For full ten minutes he lay there on his face without
moving, then rolled over. His heart had given up that terrific thumping;
he breathed luxuriously, stretched out his arms along the steaming
grass--felt happy. It was wonderful up here, with the sun burning hot
in a sky clear-blue already. How tiny everything looked below--hotel,
trees, village, chalets--little toy things! He had never before felt
the sheer joy of being high up. The rain-clouds, torn and driven in
huge white shapes along the mountains to the South, were like an army
of giants with chariots and white horses hurrying away. He thought
suddenly: "Suppose I had died when my heart pumped so! Would it have
mattered the least bit? Everything would be going on just the same, the
sun shining, the blue up there the same; and those toy things down in
the valley." That jealousy of his an hour ago, why--it was nothing--he
himself nothing! What did it matter if she were nice to that fellow in
the brown coat? What did anything matter when the whole thing was so
big--and he such a tiny scrap of it?

On the edge of the plateau, to mark the highest point, someone had
erected a rude cross, which jutted out stark against the blue sky. It
looked cruel somehow, sagged all crooked, and out of place up here; a
piece of bad manners, as if people with only one idea had dragged it
in, without caring whether or no it suited what was around it. One might
just as well introduce one of these rocks into that jolly dark church
where he had left her the other day, as put a cross up here.

A sound of bells, and of sniffing and scuffling, roused him; a large
grey goat had come up and was smelling at his hair--the leader of a
flock, that were soon all round him, solemnly curious, with their queer
yellow oblong-pupilled eyes, and their quaint little beards and tails.
Awfully decent beasts--and friendly! What jolly things to model! He lay
still (having learnt from the fisherman, his guardian, that necessary
habit in the presence of all beasts), while the leader sampled the
flavour of his neck. The passage of that long rough tongue athwart his
skin gave him an agreeable sensation, awakened a strang