by them
dead, beside her, at the bottom of the crevasse?"

"No," said the Poet; "you do not know this story, you had better let me
tell it. Her lover returned the morning before the wedding day, to be
met with the news. He gave way to no sign of grief, he repelled all
consolation. Taking his rope and axe he went up into the mountain by
himself. All through the winter he haunted the track by which she must
have travelled, indifferent to the danger that he ran, impervious
apparently to cold, or hunger, or fatigue, undeterred by storm, or mist,
or avalanche. At the beginning of the spring he returned to the village,
purchased building utensils, and day after day carried them back with him
up into the mountain. He hired no labour, he rejected the proffered
assistance of his brother guides. Choosing an almost inaccessible spot,
at the edge of the great glacier, far from all paths, he built himself a
hut, with his own hands; and there for eighteen years he lived alone.

"In the 'season' he earned good fees, being known far and wide as one of
the bravest and hardiest of all the guides, but few of his clients liked
him, for he was a silent, gloomy man, speaking little, and with never a
laugh or jest on the journey. Each fall, having provisioned himself, he
would retire to his solitary hut, and bar the door, and no human soul
would set eyes on him again until the snows melted.

"One year, however, as the spring days wore on, and he did not appear
among the guides, as was his wont, the elder men, who remembered his
story and pitied him, grew uneasy; and, after much deliberation, it was
determined that a party of them should force their way up to his eyrie.
They cut their path across the ice where no foot among them had trodden
before, and finding at length the lonely snow-encompassed hut, knocked
loudly with their axe-staves on the door; but only the whirling echoes
from the glacier's thousand walls replied, so the foremost put his strong
shoulder to the worn timber and the door flew open with a crash.

"They found him dead, as they had more than half expected, lying stiff
and frozen on the rough couch at the farther end of the hut; and, beside
him, looking down upon him with a placid face, as a mother might watch
beside her sleeping child, stood Jeanne. She wore the flowers pinned to
her dress that she had gathered when their eyes had last seen her. The
girl's face that had laughed back to their good-bye in the vill