"You always will say that, Michel," protested Chayne. "I never knew a man so obstinate."
Michel Revailloud smiled and said to Sylvia:
"I knew he would spring out on me. Never say a word against Monsieur Lattery if you would keep friends with Monsieur Chayne. See, I give you good advice in return for your kindness in visiting an old man. Nevertheless," and he dropped his voice in a pretence of secrecy and nodded emphatically: "It is true. Monsieur Lattery was not always sure on ice. And here, madame, is the portrait of one whose name is no doubt known to you in London—Professor Kenyon."
Sylvia, who was turning over the leaves of the guide's little book, looked up at the photograph.
"It was taken many years ago," she said.
"Twenty or twenty-five years ago," said Michel, with a shrug of the shoulders, "when he and I and the Alps were young."
Chayne began quickly to look through the photographs outspread upon the table. If Kenyon's portrait was amongst Revailloud's small treasures, there might be another which he had no wish for his wife to see, the portrait of the man who climbed with Kenyon, who was Kenyon's "John Lattery." There might well be the group before the Monte Rosa Hotel in Zermatt which he himself had seen in Kenyon's rooms. Fortunately however, or so it seemed to him, Sylvia was engrossed in Michel's little book.
CHAPTER XXIII
MICHEL REVAILLOUD'S FÜHRBUCH
The book indeed was of far more interest to her than the portrait of any mountaineer. It had a romance, a glamour of its own. It was just a little note-book with blue-lined pages and an old dark-red soiled leather cover which could fit into the breast pocket and never be noticed there. But it went back to the early days of mountaineering when even the passes were not all discovered and many of them were still uncrossed, when mythical peaks were still gravely allotted their positions and approximate heights in the maps; and when the easy expedition of the young lady of to-day was the difficult achievement of the explorer. It was to the early part of the book to which she turned. Here she found first ascents of which she had read with her heart in her mouth, ascents since made famous, simply recorded in the handwriting of the men who had accomplished them—the dates, the hours of starting and returning, a word or two perhaps about the condition of the snow, a warm tribute to Michel Revailloud and the signatures. The same names recurred year after year, and often the same hand recorded year after year attempts on one particular pinnacle, until at the last, perhaps after fifteen or sixteen failures, weather and snow and the determination of the climbers conspired together, and the top was reached.