His wages brought him no relaxation from toil, or delivered him from self-chosen wretchedness.

Silent and morose, he lived apart from all his fellows, who regarded him as a half-witted miser.
When the summer season brought flights of foreign tourists, Merle disappeared, and was seen no more till autumn.

Nobody knew whither he went, but it was believed he acted as a guide to some of the highest and most perilous of the Alps.

When he came back to his work at the end of the season, his blackened and swarthy face, from which the skin had peeled, and his hands wounded and torn as if from scaling jagged cliffs, bore testimony to these conjectures.
He never entered the church when mass was performed, or any congregation assembled; but at rare intervals he might be seen kneeling on the steps before the high altar, his shaggy head bent down, and his frame shaken with repressed sobs which no one could hear.

The cure had tried to win his confidence, but had failed.