He stood at the chalet which had been her home, and looked across toward Brigue and the mountains. They jutted out in bold relief, showing their whitened domes clearly in the still air, and catching waning rays of the sinking sun. Beyond them lay Italy and the lake. Perchance—but of that he had no sure knowledge—Lily was already with her husband; she would witness his shame and be, in a sense, a partner of it. He remembered her as he had seen her at the door of the chalet—a woman without a friend. Had she not called herself that? He turned away at the remembrance, and went on toward his own house. The mechanics were waiting to pack the aeroplane and send it through to Paris. Benny went in among them and began to speak of delay. *CHAPTER XXV* *THE LIGHTS OF MAGADINO* The cold was less as he began to descend amid the gentle mountains of the Ticino, and he knew that the night was won. Behind him, far away where the white caps marked the encircling mountains of the Simplon, the storm must be raging furiously, he thought. More than once a gust of the wind, tearing through a breach of the southern spurs, had flung him headlong, as a leaf is whirled by the winter blast. There had been a time when all sensation left him, when hands and feet were stiff and powerless; when the very skin of his face was as dried parchment. He made light of that, for the kindlier country lay before him, and if he gained it, this were not too high a price to pay. His landmarks were few. He had set off from Sierre while the twilight remained and had crossed the pass above Brigue at a great height and remote from danger of the peaks. He turned thence a little to the southward, and saw the smiling country for an instant as the sun sank finally, and the night crept about him. For an hour afterwards there had been the black darkness, the biting cold, the anger of the winds. Then a spell of silence intervened. He seemed to be lost in the shadows, gone from the world, drifted to the eternal darkness. But he held on resolutely, praying for the light. When the light came at last, no panorama of a splendid imagination could have surpassed the wonder of it. It was as though an unseen hand cleft a wall before him and showed him a magic city. Countless stars glowed beneath a panoply of mountains. To the right, to the left, look where he would, the lamps shone a welcome—here in clusters to speak of a town; there apart to tell of a high road. And Benny knew that they were lights about Lake Maggiore, and that the battle was won. Such good fortune as this had been in his mind from the outset, and he reckoned upon the chance. Let him espy the lights of the lake from a sufficient altitude, and his own skill would do the rest. The shanty lay almost opposite to Magadino, and if a man could not name Magadino when the lake lay illuminated far beneath him, then was he no fit pilot for an airship.