In his voice there was without doubt a note of wistfulness. "I would I could say as much for myself." That regret was as audible to Chayne as though it had been uttered. But he closed his ears to it. He began to talk eagerly of his plans. There were familiar peaks to be climbed again and some new expeditions to be attempted. "I thought we might try a new route up the Aiguille sans Nom," he suggested, and Michel assented but slowly, without the old heartiness and without that light in his face which the suggestion of something new used always to kindle. But again Chayne shut his ears. "I was very lucky to find you here," he went on cheerily. "I wrote so late that I hardly hoped for it." Michel replied with some embarrassment: "I do not climb with every one, monsieur. I hoped perhaps that one of my old patrons would want me. So I waited." Chayne looked round the platform for his friend. "And Monsieur Lattery?" he asked. The guide's face lit up. "Monsieur Lattery? Is he coming too? It will be the old days once more." "Coming? He is here now. He wrote to me from Zermatt that he would be here." Revailloud shook his head. "He is not in Chamonix, monsieur." Chayne experienced his second disappointment that morning, and it quite chilled him. He had come prepared to walk the heights like a god in the perfection of enjoyment for just six weeks. And here was his guide grown old; and his friend, the comrade of so many climbs, so many bivouacs above the snow-line, had failed to keep his tryst. "Perhaps there will be a letter from him at Couttet's," said Chayne, and the two men walked through the streets to the hotel. There was no letter, but on the other hand there was a telegram. Chayne tore it open. "Yes it's from Lattery," he said, as he glanced first at the signature. Then he read the telegram and his face grew very grave. Lattery telegraphed from Courmayeur, the Italian village just across the chain of Mont Blanc: "Starting now by Col du Géant and Col des Nantillons." The Col du Géant is the most frequented pass across the chain, and no doubt the easiest. Once past its great ice-fall, the glacier leads without difficulty to the Montanvert hotel and Chamonix. But the Col des Nantillons is another affair. Having passed the ice-fall, and when within two hours of the Montanvert, Lattery had turned to the left and had made for the great wall of precipitous rock which forms the western side of the valley through which the Glacier du Géant flows down, the wall from which spring the peaks of the Dent du Requin, the Aiguille du Plan, the Aiguille de Blaitière, the Grépon and the Charmoz. Here and there the ridge sinks between the peaks, and one such depression between the Aiguille de Blaitière and the Aiguille du Grépon is called the Col des Nantillons. To cross that pass, to descend on the other side of the great rock-wall into that bay of ice facing Chamonix, which is the Glacier des Nantillons, had been Lattery's idea.