ain lake on any side, and to
descend that sheer, ice-coated precipice was an impossibility.

It was long after nightfall when I reached the cabin again, exhausted
and dispirited.

I awoke too late on the fifth morning, and I was too stiff to make much
of a journey. I climbed to the edge of the glacier once again in the
hope of discovering an approach. I examined every foot of the ground
with meticulous care.

But whenever I approached the edge the same wall of rock ran down
vertically for some three hundred feet, veneered with ice and wrapped
in a perpetual blinding spray.

And yet sleighs could enter that valley below. For at the extreme edge
of the lake, outside the enclosed piece of land, I perceived one, a
tiny thing, far under me, and yet unmistakably a sleigh.

I was within three hundred feet of Jacqueline's home and yet as far
away as though leagues divided us. I looked down at the _chateau_ and
ground my teeth and swore that I would win her. But all the rest of
that day went in fruitless searching.

I must succeed in finding the entrance on the following day, for now
Pere Antoine might return at any time, and I knew that he would prove
far less tractable here in his own bailiwick than he had been when I
defied him at the Frontenac. By hook or by crook I must gain entrance
to the valley.

This was to be my last night in the cabin. I could not return, not
though I were perishing in the snows.

Happily my eyes were now entirely well, and my hands, though chapped
and roughened from the frost-bites, had suffered no permanent injury.
So I started out with grim resolution on the sixth morning, when the
dawn was only a red streak on the horizon and the stars still lit my
way. Before the sun rose I was standing once more outside those two
sentinel peaks.

To this point I knew the sleigh had come. But whether it had continued
straight down the valley or turned to the right along that same ridge
which I had fruitlessly explored before, it was impossible to determine.

I tried to put myself in the position of a man travelling toward the
_chateau_. Which road would I take? How and where would it occur to
me to seek an entrance into the heart of those formidable hills?

The more I puzzled and pondered over the difficulty the harder it was
to solve.

As I stood, rather weary, balancing myself upon my snow-shoes, I heard
a wolf's howl quite near to me. Raising my head, I saw no wolf, but an
Eskimo do