The ascent steepened perceptibly, and Jean, light and active as she was, found it hard work to keep pace with the man’s steady, swinging stride. Apparently his thoughts engrossed him to the exclusion of everything else, for he appeared to have utterly forgotten her existence. It was only when a slip of her foot on the beaten surface of the snow wrung a quick exclamation from her that he paused, wheeling round in consternation.
“I beg your pardon! I’m walking you off your legs! Why on earth didn’t you stop me?”
There was something irresistibly boyish about the quick apology. Jean laughed, a little breathless from the swift climb uphill.
“You seemed so bent on getting to the top in the least possible time,” she replied demurely, “that I didn’t like to disappoint you.”
“I’m afraid I make a poor sort of guide,” he admitted. “I was thinking of something else. You must forgive me.”
They resumed their climb more leisurely. The trees were thinning a bit now, and ahead, between the tall, straight trunks winged with drooping, snow-laden branches, they could catch glimpses of the white world beyond.
Presently they came out above the pine-wood on to the edge of a broad plateau and Jean uttered an exclamation of delight, gazing spell-bound at the scene thus suddenly unfolded.
Behind them, in the pine-ringed valley, a frozen reach of water gleamed like a dull sheet of metal, whilst before them, far above, stretched the great chain of mountains, pinnacle after pinnacle, capped with snow, thrusting up into the cloud-swept sky. Through rifts in the cloud—almost, it seemed, torn in the breast of heaven by those towering peaks—the sunlight slanted in long shafts, chequering the snows with shimmering patches of pale gold.
“It was worth the climb, then?”
The Englishman, his gaze on Jean’s rapt face, broke the silence abruptly. She turned to him, radiant-eyed.