Thirty or forty yards below lay a fringe of shrubs and low trees; and the Rhone valley beyond was nearly hidden. Just in front stood boldly forth the great sweep of rocky heights, hard and grey, jagged and seamed. Lines of strata might there be studied, upright and horizontal, curved and twisted, telling of long-past pressure and moulding, perhaps also of great cataclysmic upheavals, in the shaping of these mountains. The vast rock-range, one of Nature's "out crops," rose high above softer grass-green alps, dotted with hay-châlets.
The Grand Muveran, as seen from this position, was still robed in morning shadow; and sunlight fell on the small glacier to the left just below the summit. The Petit Muveran, standing pertly up to his gigantic neighbour, also cast a shadow downward.
Across the fore-shortened Rhone valley, the Dent du Midi flung his stately head aloft, no longer reduced to insignificance, as when seen from the Chamossaire summit, by the greater aristocracy of the mountain-world. Yet some fair aristocrats were visible, huddled together in the distance,—rounded and snow-clad heights of the Valaisian range, above the Glacier de Trient.
The Dent du Midi, wide-spreading, solid, substantial, with great saddle-back ridges extending outward and downward, was all blue with a different blue from that of the sky. And soft cotton-wool masses of cloud lay in the ravines, not yet dispersed by the sun's power. All around was stillness, unbroken except by the continuous murmur of insects, the click of grasshoppers, the rough caw of a crow, and two alternating human voices.
Little dreamt Doris or Maurice who was on the other side of the châlet wall!
Mrs. Brutt had meant to stay where she was "only a minute." She had an uneasy consciousness that her position was far from dignified.
So she would only just listen to a word or two. Then, with scathing apologies, she would step forth upon the guilty pair.
But she stayed much longer than a minute; and she heard much more than a word or two.