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"Yes, to-morrow," she said.

"Oho! It is your first mountain, mademoiselle?"

"Yes."

"And Jean here is your guide. Jean and his brother, I suppose?" Michel
laid his hand affectionately on the guide's shoulder. "You could not do
better, mademoiselle."

He looked at her thoughtfully for a little while. She was fresh--fresh as
the smell of the earth in spring after a fall of rain. Her eyes, the
alertness of her face, the eager tones of her voice, were irresistible to
him, an old tired man. How much more irresistible then to a younger man.
Her buoyancy would lift such an one clear above his melancholy, though it
were deep as the sea. He himself, Michel Revailloud, felt twice the
fellow he had been when he sat in the balcony above the Arve.

"And what mountain is it to be, mademoiselle?" he asked.

The girl took a step from the door of the hotel and looked upward. To the
south, but quite close, the long thin ridge of the Aiguille des Charmoz
towered jagged and black against the starlit sky. On one pinnacle of that
ridge a slab of stone was poised like the top of a round table on the
slant. It was at that particular pinnacle that Sylvia looked.


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