," said Linforth, "if old Andrew Linforth were still
alive. Somewhere in your country, perhaps in Kohara, waiting for the
thing he dreamed to come to pass. He would be an old man now, but he
might still be alive."

"I wonder," said Shere Ali absently, and he suddenly turned to Linforth.
"Nothing must come between us," he cried almost fiercely. "Nothing to
hinder what we shall do together."

He was the more emotional of the two. The dreams to which they had given
utterance had uplifted him.

"That's all right," said Linforth, and he turned back into the hut. But
he remembered afterwards that it was Shere Ali who had protested against
the possibility of their association being broken.

They came out from the hut again at half-past three in the morning and
looked up to a cloudless starlit sky which faded in the east to the
colour of pearl. Above their heads some knobs of rock stood out upon the
thin crest of the buttress against the sky. In the darkness of a small
couloir underneath the knobs Peter was already ascending. The traverse of
the Meije even for an experienced mountaineer is a long day's climb. They
reached the summit of the Grand Pic in seven hours, descended into the
Breche Zsigmondy, climbed up the precipice on the further side of that
gap, and reached the Pic Central by two o'clock in the afternoon. There
they rested for an hour, and looked far down to the village of La Grave
among the cornfields of the valley. There was no reason for any hurry.

"We shall reach La Grave by eight," said Peter, but he was wrong, as they
soon discovered. A slope which should have been soft snow down which they
could plunge was hard ice, in which a ladder of steps must be cut before
the glacier could be reached. The glacier itself was crevassed so that
many a devour was necessary, and occasionally a jump; and evening came
upon them while they were on the Rocher de L'Aigle. It was quite dark
when at last they reached the grass slopes, and still far below them the
lights were gleaming in La Grave. To both men those grass slopes seemed
interminable. The lights of La Grave seemed never to come nearer, never
to grow larger. Little points of fire very far away--as they had been at
first, so they remained. But for the slope of ground beneath his feet and
the aching of his knees, Linforth could almost have believed that they
were not descending at all. He struck a match and looked at his watch and
saw that it was after nine; and a l