They walked in single file, Jean leading with a lighted lantern in his hand, so that Sylvia, who followed next, might pick her way amongst the boulders.

Thus they marched for two hours along the left bank of the glacier and then descended on to ice.

They went forward partly on moraine, partly on ice at the foot of the crags of the Aiguille Verte.
And gradually the darkness thinned.

Dim masses of black rock began to loom high overhead, and to all seeming very far away.

The sky paled, the dim masses of rock drew near about the climbers, and over the steep walls, the light flowed into the white basin of the glacier as though from every quarter of the sky.
Sylvia stopped and Chayne came up with her.
"Well ?" he asked; and as he saw her face his thoughts were suddenly swept back to the morning when the beauty of the ice-world was for the first time vouchsafed to him.