For a little time Sylvia sat idly watching the great battle ships at firing-practice in the Bay.

It was an afternoon of August; a light haze hung in the still air softening the distant promontories; and on the waveless sparkling sea the great ships, coal-black to the eye, circled about the targets, with now and then a roar of thunder and a puff of smoke, like some monstrous engines of heat--heat stifling and oppressive.

By sheer contrast, Sylvia began to dream of the cool glaciers; and the Chalet de Lognan suddenly stood visible before her eyes.

She watched the sunlight die off the red rocks of the Chardonnet, the evening come with silent feet across the snow, and the starlit night follow close upon its heels; night fled as she dreamed.
She saw the ice-slope on the Aiguille d'Argentiere, she could almost hear the chip-chip of the axes as the steps were cut and the perpetual hiss as the ice-fragments streamed down the slope.

Then she looked toward Walter Hine with the speculative inquiry which had come so often into her eyes of late.