s, on which you remember
reading: "Charles Knollys--lost in Carinthia"----This was all she
would have inscribed; he was but lost; no one _knew_ that he was dead.
Was he not yet to be found? There was no grassy mound beside it; the
earth was smooth. Not even the date was there. But Mrs. Knollys never
went to read it. She waited until he should come; until that last
journey, repeating the travels of their wedding-days, when she should
go to Germany to bring him home.

So the woman's life went on in England, and the glacier in the Alps
moved on slowly; and the woman waited for it to be gone.

IV.

In the summer of 1882, the little Carinthian village of Heiligenblut
was haunted by two persons. One was a young German scientist, with
long hair and spectacles; the other was a tall English lady, slightly
bent, with a face wherein the finger of time had deeply written tender
things. Her hair was white as silver, and she wore a long black veil.
Their habits were strangely similar. Every morning, when the eastern
light shone deepest into the ice-cavern at the base of the great
Pasterzen glacier, these two would walk thither; then both would sit
for an hour or two and peer into its depths. Neither knew why the
other was there. The woman would go back for an hour in the late
afternoon; the man, never. He knew that the morning light was
necessary for his search.

The man was the famous young Zimmermann, son of his father, the old
Doctor, long since dead. But the Herr Doctor had written a famous
tract, when late in life, refuting all Spluethners, past, present, and
to come; and had charged his son, in his dying moments, as a most
sacred trust, that he should repair to the base of the Pasterzen
glacier in the year 1882, where he would find a leaden bullet, graven
with his father's name, and the date A. U. C. 2590. All this would be
vindication of his father's science. Spluethner, too, was a very old
man, and Zimmermann the younger (for even he was no longer young) was
fearful lest Spluethner should not live to witness his own refutation.
The woman and the man never spoke to each other.

Alas, no one could have known Mrs. Knollys for the fair English girl
who had been there in the young days of the century; not even the
innkeeper, had he been there. But he, too, was long since dead. Mrs.
Knollys was now bent and white-haired; she had forgotten, herself, how
she had looked in those old days. Her life had