mong the
most sublime scenery. Sometimes he scaled solitary peaks and looked down
upon far-stretching landscapes below him, with broad dead rivers of
glaciers winding between the high and terrible masses of snow-clad
rocks, and creeping down into peaceful valleys, where little living
streams of silvery gray wandered among chalets looking no larger than
the rocks strewn around them, with a tiny church in their midst lifting
up its spire of glittering metal with a kind of childish confidence and
exultation. Here and there in deep sunken hollows lay small tarns, black
as night, and guilty looking, with precipices overhanging them fringed
with pointed pine-trees, which sought in vain to mirror themselves in
those pitch-dark waters. And above them all, gazing down in silent
greatness, rose the snow-mountains, very cold, whiter than any other
whiteness on earth, pure and stainless, and apparently as unapproachable
in their far-off loveliness as the deep blue of the pure sky behind
them.

But there was something unutterably awful to Roland Sefton in this
sublimity. A bad man, whose ear has never heard the voice of Nature, and
whose eye is blind to her ineffable beauty, may dwell in such places and
not be crushed by them. The dull herdsmen, thinking only of their cattle
and of the milking to be done twice a day, might live their own stupid,
commonplace lives there. The chance visitor who spent a few hours in
scaling difficult cliffs would perhaps catch a brief and fleeting sense
of their awfulness, only too quickly dissipated by the unwonted toil and
peril of his situation. But Roland Sefton felt himself exiled to their
ice-bound solitudes, cut off from all companionship, and attended only
by an accusing conscience.

Morning after morning, when his short and feverish night was ended, he
went out in the early dawn while all the valleys below were still
slumbering in darkness, self-driven into the wilderness of rock and snow
rising above the wretched chalets. With coarse food sufficient for the
wants of the day he strayed wherever his aimless footsteps led him. It
was seldom that he stayed more than a night or two in the same
herdsman's hut. When he was well out of the track of tourists he
ventured down into the lower villages now and then, seeking a few days
of comparative comfort. But some rumor, or the arrival of some chance
traveller more enterprising and investigating than the mass, always
drove him away again. There was n