It was close on midnight.  As Hibbert passed through the hall to get his overcoat and snow-boots, he saw men in the passage by the “sport-room,” greasing their ski against an early start.  Knapsack luncheons were being ordered by the kitchen swing doors.  He sighed.  Lighting a cigarette a friend offered him, he returned a confused reply to some question as to whether he could join their party in the morning.  It seemed he did not hear it properly.  He passed through the outer vestibule between the double glass doors, and went into the night.

The man who asked the question watched him go, an expression of anxiety momentarily in his eyes.

“Don’t think he heard you,” said another, laughing.  “You’ve got to shout to Hibbert, his mind’s so full of his work.”

“He works too hard,” suggested the first, “full of queer ideas and dreams.”

But Hibbert’s silence was not rudeness.  He had not caught the invitation, that was all.  The call of the hotel-world had faded.  He no longer heard it.  Another wilder call was sounding in his ears.

For up the street he had seen a little figure moving.  Close against the shadows of the baker’s shop it glided—­white, slim, enticing.

VI

And at once into his mind passed the hush and softness of the snow—­yet with it a searching, crying wildness for the heights.  He knew by some incalculable, swift instinct she would not meet him in the village street.  It was not there, amid crowding houses, she would speak to him.  Indeed, already she had disappeared, melted from view up the white vista of the moonlit road.  Yonder, he divined, she waited where the highway narrowed abruptly into the mountain path beyond the chalets.

It did not even occur to him to hesitate; mad though it seemed, and was—­this sudden craving for the heights with her, at least for open spaces where the snow lay thick and fresh—­it was too imperious to be denied.  He does not remember going up to his room, putting the sweater over his evening clothes, and getting into the fur gauntlet gloves and the helmet cap of wool.  Most certainly he has no recollection of fastening on his ski; he must have done it automatically.  Some faculty of normal observation was in abeyance, as it were.  His mind was out beyond the village—­out with the snowy mountains and the moon.

Henri Defago, putting up the shutters over his cafe windows, saw him pass, and wondered mildly:  “Un monsieur qui fait du ski a cette heure!  Il est Anglais, done ...!” He shrugged his shoulders, as though a man had the right to choose his own way of death.  And Marthe Perotti, the hunchback wife of the shoemaker, looking by chance from her window, caught his figure moving swiftly up the road.  She had other thoughts, for she knew and believed the old traditions of the witches and snow-beings that steal the souls of men.  She had even heard, ’twas said, the dreaded “synagogue” pass roaring down the street at night, and now, as then, she hid her eyes.  “They’ve called to him ... and he must go,” she murmured, making the sign of the cross.