Edgar laughingly assured her that her seat was perfection, even in the railed-in saddle, and that she should have the best horse money could buy, or judgment secure. The two young men went on before them, leaping from stone to stone, and making great play with their alpenstocks as they bounded across the streamlets which frequently intersected their path. It was a narrow, narrow way, winding up the shoulder of the hill, now in sunlight, now in shade; the summer air sweetened with the scent of the pine-trees; pine-clad slopes above, pine-clad slopes below, sometimes gently slanting downward, a green hillside which little children might play upon, sometimes a sheer descent, terrible to the eye; _châlets_ dotting the meadows far below; villages spread out on the greensward of the valley, and looking like clusters of toy houses; the road winding through the valley like a silver ribbon; the awful Jungfrau range facing them, as they ascended, in all its unspeakable majesty; grander, and yet ever grander, as they came nearer to it. Sometimes, as they rode through the pine-trees, they seemed to be riding straight into the snowy mountains; they were so close, so close to that white majesty. Then as they came suddenly into the open, those airy peaks receded, remote as ever, melting farther and farther away as one rode after them, like a never-to-be-reached fairyland. ‘I could almost cry with vexation,’ exclaimed Daphne after one of these optical illusions. ‘I thought we were close to the Jungfrau, and there she stands smiling down at me, with her pallid enigmatical smile, from the very top of the world. Edgar, if you love me, you must take me up that impertinent mountain before I am year older.’ ‘You were talking yesterday of the Cordilleras.’ ‘I know, but we must finish off the Alps first—Mont Blanc, and the Jungfrau, the Schreckhorn, the Rothhorn, the Matterhorn, the Finsteraarhorn, and all the rest of them. I cannot be defied by the insolence of Nature. She has thrown her gauntlet, and I must positively pick it up. If the mountain won’t come to Mahomet—and the general experience seems to show that mountains are obstinate things—Mahomet must go to the mountain. I mean to have it out with Mont Blanc before I die.’ ‘I don’t believe a lady has ever done the ascent,’ said Edgar, leading his mistress’s meek and patient steed along a winding ledge. The animal was a mere infant, rising three, but as free from skittishness as if he had been rising three-and-twenty. ‘That shows how densely ignorant you must be of the age you live in,’ protested Daphne. ‘Be sure that there is nothing in this life which the man of the present can do which the woman of the present won’t imitate; and the more essentially masculine the thing is the more certain she is to attempt it.’ ‘But I hope you don’t rank yourself among masculine women, Daphne,’ murmured Edgar, drawing protectingly near her, as they turned a sharp corner. ‘I don’t; but I mean to ascend Mont Blanc.’