Nature, who loves to do a gentle thing even in her most savage moods, had taken one of those empty water-courses and filled it from end to end with forget-me-nots.  As the wind ruffled the millions of petals, this bed of flowers, only a few inches wide but nearly a quarter of a mile in length, looked like a flashing stream of heavenly blue water rushing down the mountain side.

By and by the faint kling-kling of a cowbell sounding far up the height told the travellers that they were nearing the plateau.  Occasionally they descried a herdsman’s chalet, pitched at an angle against the wind on the edge of an arete, or clinging like a wasp’s-nest to some jutting cornice of rock.  After making four or five short turns, the party passed through a clump of scraggy, wind-swept pines, and suddenly found themselves at the top of Montanvert.

A few paces brought them to the Pavilion, a small inn kept by the guide Couttet.  Here the mules were turned over to the hostler, and Miss Ruth and Lynde took a quarter of an hour’s rest, examining the collection of crystals and moss-agates and horn-carvings which M. Couttet has for show in the apartment that serves him as salon, cafe, and museum.  Then the two set out for the rocks overlooking the glacier.

The cliff rises precipitously two hundred and fifty feet above the frozen sea, whose windings can be followed, for a distance of five miles, to the walls of the Grandes and Petites Jorasses.  Surveyed from this height, the Mer de Glace presents the appearance of an immense ploughed field covered by a fall of snow that has become dingy.  The peculiar corrugation of the surface is scarcely discernible, and one sees nothing of the wonderful crevasses, those narrow and often fathomless partings of the ice, to look into which is like looking into a split sapphire.  The first view from the cliff is disappointing, but presently the marvel of it all assails and possesses one.

“I should like to go down on the ice,” said Ruth, after regarding the scene for several minutes in silence.

“We must defer that to another day,” said Lynde.  “The descent of the moraine from this point is very arduous, and is seldom attempted by ladies.  Besides, if we do anything we ought to cross the glacier and go home by the way of the Mauvais Pas.  We will do that yet.  Let us sit upon this boulder and talk.”

“What shall we talk about?  I don’t feel like talking.”

“I’ll talk to you.  I don’t know of what...  I will tell you a story.”

“A story, Mr. Lynde?  I like stories as if I were only six years old.  But I don’t like those stories which begin with ’Once there was a little girl,’ who always turns out to be the little girl that is listening.”

“Mine is not of that kind,” replied Lynde, with a smile, steadying Miss Ruth by the hand as she seated herself on the boulder; “and yet it touches on you indirectly.  It all happened long ago.”