"It was kind of you.

Though I said nothing, I was grateful"; and he was moved to open his heart to her, and to speak of his dead friend.
The darkness gathered about them; he spoke in the curt sentences which men use who shrink from any emotional display; he interrupted himself to light his pipe.

But none the less she understood the reality of his distress.

He told her with a freedom of which he was not himself at the moment quite aware, of a clean, strong friendship which owed nothing to sentiment, which was never fed by protestations, which endured through long intervals, and was established by the memory of great dangers cheerily encountered and overcome.

It had begun amongst the mountains, and surely, she thought, it had retained to the end something of their inspiration.
"We first met in the Tyrol, eight years ago.