She was fresh--fresh as the smell of the earth in spring after a fall of rain.

Her eyes, the alertness of her face, the eager tones of her voice, were irresistible to him, an old tired man.

How much more irresistible then to a younger man.
Her buoyancy would lift such an one clear above his melancholy, though it were deep as the sea.

He himself, Michel Revailloud, felt twice the fellow he had been when he sat in the balcony above the Arve.
"And what mountain is it to be, mademoiselle ?" he asked.
The girl took a step from the door of the hotel and looked upward.

To the south, but quite close, the long thin ridge of the Aiguille des Charmoz towered jagged and black against the starlit sky.