Their journey was nearly done. The carriage went down into the valley, then climbed another hill, and they had paused the outskirts of the village of Grindelwald, and were drawing up in the garden in front of the Bear Hotel. Very full of life and bustle was the inn garden on this bright summer morning. Tourists without number standing about, or sitting under the verandah, Americans, Germans, English, French, all full of life and enjoyment; some starting with their alpenstocks, intent on pedestrian excursions; ladies and sedentary middle-aged gentlemen being hoisted on to mules; carriages driving in; horses being fed and cleaned; a Babel of languages, a perpetual moving in and out. Mr. Goring ordered a slight refection of wine and coffee, rolls and honey, to be brought to a pleasant spot under the verandah, at a point where the view across the deep valley to the hills beyond was widest and grandest. Here they rested themselves a little before starting on foot for the lower glacier. Both Madoline and Daphne were in favour of walking. ‘I went on a mule when I was here with my father,’ said Lina, ‘and I remember thinking how much I should have preferred being free to choose my own path.’ It was a lovely walk, so soon as they were clear of the hotels and boarding-houses, and the scattered wooden _châlets_ of the village, just such a ramble as Daphne loved; a narrow footpath winding up and down a verdant hillside—here a garden, and there an orchard—funny little cottages and cottage-gardens perched anyhow on slopes and angles of the road; a rustic bridge across the rocky bed of a river; and there in front of them the glacier—a mass of corrugated ice lying on a steep slope between two mountains—shining, beautiful, like a pale sapphire. They loitered as much as they pleased by the wayside, Daphne straying here and there as her fancy led her—a restless, birdlike creature, almost seeming to have wings, so lightly did she flutter from hillock to crag, so airy was the step with which she skimmed along the narrow rocky pathway, beaten by the feet of so many travellers. They spent a good deal of time in the immediate neighbourhood of the glacier, ‘doing it thoroughly,’ as Edgar remarked afterwards, with a satisfied air; and then they went quietly back to The Bear, and dined in a corner of the big, barren dining-room, and drove back to Interlaken in the summer dusk, Gerald almost as silent as he had been the night before during the much shorter drive from Lauterbrunnen. ‘I’m afraid it bores you to go over the ground you know so well,’ said Madoline, grieved at her lover’s silence, which looked like depression, or mental weariness.