Madame de Camours'
watchings had not been in vain, a decree had been obtained from the Pope
annulling the marriage. Much had happened. But even after twenty years
the memory of that formal life in the Provencal chateau was vivid enough;
and Mrs. Thesiger yawned. Then she laughed. Monsieur de Camours and his
mother had always been able to make people yawn.
"So you are glad that we are going to Chamonix, Sylvia--so glad that you
couldn't sleep?"
"Yes."
It sounded rather unaccountable to Mrs. Thesiger, but then Sylvia was to
her a rather unaccountable child. She turned her face to the wall and
fell asleep.
Sylvia's explanation, however, happened to be true. Chamonix meant the
great range of Mont Blanc, and Sylvia Thesiger had the passion for
mountains in her blood. The first appearance of their distant snows
stirred her as no emotion ever had, so that she came to date her life by
these appearances rather than by the calendar of months and days. The
morning when from the hotel windows at Glion she had first seen the twin
peaks of the Dent du Midi towering in silver high above a blue corner of
the Lake of Geneva, formed one memorable date. Once, too, in the
winter-time, as the Rome express stopped at three o'clock in the morning
at the frontier on the Italian side of the Mont Cenis tunnel, she had
carefully lifted the blind on the right-hand side of the sleeping
compartment and had seen a great wall of mountains tower up in a clear
frosty moonlight from great buttresses of black rock to delicate
pinnacles of ice soaring infinite miles away into a cloudless sky of
blue.
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