The pedlar lay in the valley.  Grimshaw stood on the brink of the “wall.”  He turned, and saw Doctor Waram walking quickly away across the plateau without a backward glance.  They had agreed that Waram was to return at once to the village and report the death of “his friend, Mr. Grimshaw.”  The body, they knew, would be crushed beyond recognition—­a bruised and broken fragment, like enough to Cecil Grimshaw to pass whatever examination would be given it.  Grimshaw himself was to go through the wood to the highroad, then on to Finhaut and Chamonix and into France.  He was never again to write to Dagmar, to return to England, or to claim his English property....

Can you imagine his feelings—­deprived of his arrogant personality, his fame, his very identity, clothed in another man’s dirty garments, wearing about his neck a clattering pedlar’s outfit, upon his feet the clumsy boots of a peasant?  Grimshaw—­the exquisite futurist, the daffodil, apostle of the aesthetic!

He stood for a moment looking after Douglas Waram.  Once, in a panic, he called.  But Waram disappeared between the larches, without, apparently, having heard.  Grimshaw wavered, unable to decide upon the way to the highroad.  He could not shake off a sense of loneliness and terror, as if he himself had gone whirling down to his death.  Like a man who comes slowly back from the effects of ether, he perceived, one by one, the familiar aspects of the landscape—­the delicate flowers powdering the plateau, the tasselled larches on the slope, the lofty snow-peaks still suffused with rosy morning light.  This, then, was the world.  This clumsy being, moving slowly toward the forest, was himself—­not Cecil Grimshaw but another man.  His mind sought clumsily for a name.  Pierre—­no, not Pierre; too common-place!  Was he still fastidious?  No.  Then Pierre, by all means!  Pierre Pilleux.  That would do.  Pilleux.  A name suggestive of a good amiable fellow, honest and slow.  When he got down into France he would change his identity again—­grow a beard, buy some decent clothes.  A boulevardier... gay, perverse, witty....  The thought delighted him and he hurried through the forest, anxious to pass through Salvan before Doctor Waram got there.  He felt extraordinarily light and exhilarated now, intoxicated, vibrant.  His spirit soared; almost he heard the rushing of his old self forward toward some unrecognizable and beautiful freedom.

When he struck the road the sun was high and it was very hot.  Little spirals of dust kicked up at his heels.  He was not afraid of recognition.  Happening to glance at his hands, he became aware of their whiteness, and stooping, rubbed them in the dust.

Then a strange thing happened.  Another herd of goats trotted down from the grassy slopes and spilled into the road-way.  And another dog with lolling tongue and wagging tail wove in and out, shepherding the little beasts.  They eddied about Grimshaw, brushing against him, their moon-stone eyes full of a vague terror of that barking guardian at their heels.  The dog drove them ahead, circled, and with a low whine came back to Grimshaw, leaping up to lick his hand.