Dyke, coming in just when the operation was finished, gave a yell of horror and fury at sight of her sitting there brutally bobbed, changed while his back was turned from his glorious dusky-locked princess into a travesty of du Maurier’s popular heroine, Trilby. He beat his breast, he waved his arms, he roared. And then, as Emmie pacified and explained, he picked up fallen meshes, ran them through his fingers, and almost wept.
“Your greatest loveliness. Oh, Emmie, I can’t bear it. It has broken my heart.”
“Don’t be silly, Tony. My hair will grow again. There will be plenty of time—when you are gone”; and again she explained her reasons.
Ah, yes. Well, it must be admitted, lice are lice. Dyke muttered and moaned, but gradually submitted to the cruel stroke. Yes, perhaps, after all, it was the wisest thing to do. “But mark you. This”—after winding a long mesh round his fingers he was putting it in his pocket-book—“this I shall keep for remembrance to my dying day.”
She did not mind the loss of her pretty hair. She did not mind anything—not the foul odours, the greasy food, the bitter cold, the inability to sleep. She feared nothing, she regretted nothing. She was with him still, postponing the inevitable, sharing life with him high in the Andes.
She slept a little towards dawn, and was awakened by Dyke, who for two hours had been working with his men in the darkness outside, loading the pack saddles, seeing that everything was in its place. Now the cavalcade was ready to move. They drank some hot coffee, and started.
It was wonderful to her, most wonderful, that departure in the grey mists of morning. Near a broken gap in the wall of the compound, Dyke, sitting high beside her, held the rein of her mule, and they remained there while one after another the mounted men and the laden mules flitted past, silent, ghostly; vague shapes seen for a moment and immediately lost in the mist. Then, with his hand still on the rein, they trotted boldly on, as if through a white sea, until he had reached the head of the column.
The ground was apparently level and there seemed to be few impediments, but as yet nothing of the way was visible. When Dyke spoke to her his voice seemed to come to her from a distance and to roll from her in the moving waves of white vapour; strange murmurs swept above her head; the rattle of hoofs as they struck upon stone made echoing sounds behind her; and she had what she supposed to be an illusion of a bell that chimed and tinkled, now near, now far away, but never ceasing.
Then swiftly yet gradually the mists broke and the light came flooding down upon them. First the tall peaks caught fire, vast rock buttresses thousands of feet high flamed with orange and crimson, black ragged cliffs shone and glittered, fields of dazzling white snow hung like islands in the air till dark brown mountains rose to carry them; then the whole brightly coloured masses of the hills seemed to spring forth, to steady themselves, to grow less fantastic of shape, more solid of texture; and in a few moments it was broad daylight, with a translucid blue sky, every object far or near sharply defined and the mighty crests of Aconcagua, monarch of the wilds, highest mountain of the southern continent, towering majestic in the blue.