Sylvia raised her face to Hilary’s, and before she could put her question he answered it quietly with a nod of the head.

“Yes, that is so,” he said.

“You knew?”

“I have known for a long time,” he replied.

Sylvia was lost in wonder.  Yet there was no doubt in her mind.  Gabriel Strood, of whom she had made a hero, whose exploits she knew almost by heart, had suffered from a physical disability which might well have kept the most eager mountaineer to the level.  It was because of his mastery over his disability that she had set him so high in her esteem.  Well, there had been a day when her father had tramped across the downs to Dorchester and had come back lame and in spite of his lameness had left his companions behind.  Other trifles recurred to her memory.  She had found him reading “The Alps in 1864,” and yes—­he had tried to hide from her the title of the book.  On their first meeting he had understood at once when she had spoken to him of the emotion which her first mountain peak had waked in her.  And before that—­yes, her guide had cried aloud to her, “You remind me of Gabriel Strood.”  She owed it to him that she had turned to the Alps as to her heritage, and that she had brought to them an instinctive knowledge.  Her first feeling was one of sheer pride in her father.  Then the doubts began to thicken.  He called himself Garratt Skinner.

“Why?  But why?” she cried, impulsively, and Chayne, still leaning on her chair, pressed her arm with his hand and warned her to be silent.

“I will tell you afterward,” he said, quietly, and then he suddenly drew himself upright.  The movement was abrupt like the movement of a man thoroughly startled—­more startled even than she had been by the unexpected sight of her father’s handwriting.  She looked up into his face.  He was staring at the open page of Michel’s book.  She turned back to it herself and saw nothing which should so trouble him.  Over Gabriel Strood’s signature there were just these words written in his hand and nothing more: 

“Mont Blanc by the Brenva route.  July, 1868.”

Yet it was just that sentence which had so startled Hilary.  Gabriel Strood had then climbed Mont Blanc from the Italian side—­up from the glacier to the top of the great rock-buttress, then along the world-famous ice-arete, thin as a knife edge, and to right and left precipitous as a wall, and on the far side above the ice-ridge up the hanging glaciers and the ice-cliffs to the summit of the Corridor.  From the Italian side of the range of Mont Blanc!  And the day before yesterday Gabriel Strood had crossed with Walter Hine to Italy, bound upon some expedition which would take five days, five days at the least.