At such times he would sit with folded arms and knit brows looking out and away to the far stretches of horizon that were fleeing evermore before them. Only the child had power to arouse him from one of these gloomy fits of abstraction, though sometimes his mood was so dark that even she scarcely ventured to break in upon it. But she never really feared him; there was a strange sympathy between the two that made her understand him in some wonderful way.
As they neared the end of their journey and rest became a possibility, L'Estrange once more tried to refrain from his death-winged potion. He felt that languor and weakness were possessing themselves of his being, and strength of mind would be more needful than strength of body for the work he had to do.
Only those who have known what this refraining means can understand his sufferings. Racked with pain, that reckless gnawing pain which seems to be verily eating into life, he lay for two nights and days on a bed in the hotel at Grindelwald, where he had decided to remain for a few days. And still during the long hours the patient child, his ministering angel in very truth, sat by his bedside helping her friend to bear, and waiting for him to be better.
[CHAPTER VI.]
THE LIFE OF A SOLITARY.
And soon we feel the want of one kind heart
To love what's well, and to forgive what's ill
In us.
Maurice Grey had at last been successful in his weary seeking after loneliness. Whether he had gained happiness thereby is scarcely so easy to say; certainly his surroundings could not possibly have been more beautiful or peace-inspiring.
On an Alpine meadow green with a vivid brightness, spangled in the spring and early summer with many-colored fragrant flowers, bounded on one side by a wood, the home of ferns and moss and lovely things of every shape and hue, overtopped on the other by a ridge of mountains that, rising sheer from the soft greenness, towered into white ice-fields and shoulders and pinnacles of virgin snow, he had found in the summer of that year a tumble-down chalet. It was large and tolerably commodious, evidently intended to be something superior to the ordinary dwelling of the Swiss herdsman.