always going up, up, and with a small cluster of
brown old high-perched chalets evidently for its
goal. Mrs. Stringham reached in due course the
chalets, and there received from a bewildered old"
woman, a very fearful person to behold, an indica
tion that sufficiently guided her. The young lady
had been seen not long before passing further on,
over a crest and to a place where the way would
drop again, as our unappeased inquirer found it, in
fact, a quarter of an hour later, markedly and almost
alarmingly to do. It led somewhere, yet apparently
quite into space, for the great side of the mountain
appeared, from where she pulled up, to fall away
altogether, though probably but to some issue be
low and out of sight. Her uncertainty moreover
was. brief, for she next became aware of the presence
on a fragment of rock, twenty yards off, of the
Tauchnitz volume that the girl had brought out,
and that therefore pointed to her shortly previous
passage. She had rid herself of the book, which
was an encumbrance, and meant of course to pick
it up on her return; but as she hadn't yet picked it
up what on earth had become of her? Mrs. String-
ham, I hasten to add, was within a few moments to
see; but it was quite an accident that she had not,
before they were over, betrayed by her deeper agi
tation the fact of her own nearness.

The whole place, with the descent of the path
and as a sequel to a sharp turn that was masked by
rocks and shrubs, appeared to fall precipitously and

[[137]]

p136 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p137w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p138

v?