mediately about us were ice-worn, and the place
was paved with ice-worn boulders. Two huge bluffs put their foreheads
together above us and hid the glacier from us, but one could feel the
near presence of ice in the air. Out between them boiled a little
torrent, and spread into a hundred intercommunicating channels amidst
the great pebbles. And those pebbles were covered by a network of
marvellously gnarled and twisted stems bearing little leaves and
blossoms, a network at once very ancient and very fresh, giving a
peculiar gentleness and richness to the Alpine severity that had dwarfed
and tangled them. It was astounding that any plant could find
nourishment among those stones. The great headland, with patches of
yellowish old snow still lingering here and there upon its upper masses,
had crept insensibly between us and the remote hotel and now hid it
altogether. There was nothing to remind us of the world that had
separated us, except that old and leaky boat we had drawn up upon the
stones at the limpid water's edge.

"It is as if we had come out of life together," she whispered, giving a
voice to my thought.

She sat down upon a boulder and I sat on a lower slab a yard or so away,
and we looked at one another. "It's still unreal," she said.

I felt awkward and at a loss as I sat there before her, as a man unused
to drawing-rooms might feel in the presence of a strange hostess.

"You are so _you_," I said; "so altogether my nearest thing--and so
strange too, so far off, that I feel--shy....

"I'm shy," I repeated. "I feel that if I speak loudly all this will
vanish...."

I looked about me. "But surely this is the most beautiful place in the
whole world! Is it indeed in the world?"

"Stephen, my dear," she began presently, "what a strange thing life is!
Strange! The disproportions! The things that will not fit together. The
little things that eat us up, and the beautiful things that might save
us and don't save us, don't seem indeed to have any meaning in regard to
ordinary sensible affairs.... This _beauty_....

"Do you remember, Stephen, how long ago in the old park you and I talked
about immortality and you said then you did not want to know anything of
what comes after life. Even now do you want to know? You are too busy
and I am not busy enough. I want to be sure, not only to know, but to
know that it is so, that this life--no, not _this_ life, but that life,
is only the bleak twilight of the morning. I t