“The relations between us are simply ridiculous,” he said, apostrophizing the mighty snow-clad pile.
But as there was no help for it, he prepared, like Mahomet, to go the mountain cheerfully. So he secured a guide to the Tête Noire for the following day.
That done, he gave himself up entirely to the new sweetness that had come into his life.
The few moments of the morning's meeting had lit up the day. Much still remained unspoken, but there was no longer the irritating sense of incompleteness that had filled him the night before. Yet all the deeper, subtler pulsations of his love craved immediate expression. He sat in his hotel bedroom far into the night, writing her his first letter.
For the next few days he occupied himself strenuously with the sights of Chamonix. He joined a party over the Mer de Glace, took one day over the Grands Mulets, ascended the Aiguille Verte, and then rested with a feeling of well-earned repose. His great event of the day was the Geneva post. He had received two letters from Katherine. One she had written a few hours after his departure--he put it to his lips. The second, for which he waited with a lover's impatience, was in answer to the first he had written. At first he read it with a slight shade of disappointment. It seemed to lack the spontaneity of the other. But Raine, by nature chivalrous towards women, and holding them as creatures with emotions more delicately balanced than men and subject to a thousand undreamed-of shynesses, quickly assigned to such causes the restraint he had noticed, and, reading in, as it were a touch of passion into every touch of tenderness, satisfied the longings of his heart. There were letters too from his father. The first stated that he had mooted the plan to Felicia of the little jaunt to Lucerne, and that she had acceded to it joyfully, but in the second the old man complained of sudden poorliness. From the third Raine learned that he was in bed with a bad cold, and that Lucerne had been postponed indefinitely.
The news depressed him slightly. No letter from Katherine had accompanied it, to cheer him. On the evening of his day of rest, therefore, he was less in love with Chamonix than ever. By way of compensation the weather was bright and clear, and the sunny seat under the firs in the hotel gardens, whither he had retired with his travelling edition of “Tristram Shandy,” was warm and reposeful. He was speculating over the Rabelaisian humour of Mr. Shandy's domestic concerns, and enjoying the incongruity between it and the towering masses of rock and glacier and snow on the other side of the valley, when a man sauntered up the gravelled path, stopped before him, and asked for a light.