But the bright gold was withdrawing. Presently it stood only upon the higher ridges. The colour was going and the angular shadows, leaving a bleakness of white, leaving the mountains higher in their whiteness. The highest sloped more swiftly than the others from its lower mass and ended in a long cone of purest white with a flattened top sharply aslant against the deepening blue; as if walking up it. It held her eyes, its solid thickness of snow, the way from its blunted tower it came broadening down unbroken by crag, radiant white until far down its pinewoods made a gentleness about its base. Up there on the quiet of its topmost angle it seemed there must be someone, minutely rejoicing in its line along the sky. A turn brought peaks whose gold had turned to rose. She had not eyes enough for seeing. Seeing was not enough. There was sound, if only one could hear it, in this still, signalling light. The last of it was ruby gathered departing upon the topmost crags, seeming, the moment before it left them, to be deeply wrought into the crinkled rock. At a sharp bend the face of the sideways-lounging driver came into sight, expressionless. “_Schön, die letzte Glüh_,” he said quietly. When she had pronounced her “_Wunderschön_,” she sat back released from intentness seeing the scene as one who saw it daily; and noticed then that the colour ebbed from the mountains had melted into the sky. It was this marvel of colour, turning the sky to molten rainbow, that the driver had meant as well as the rubied ridges that had kept the sky forgotten. Just above a collar of snow, that dipped steeply between the peaks it linked, the sky was a soft greenish purple paling upwards from mauve-green to green whose edges melted imperceptibly into the deepening blue. In a moment they were turned towards the opposite sky, bold in smoky russet rising to amber and to saffron-rose expanding upwards; a high radiant background for its mountain, spread like a banner, not pressed dense and close with deeps strangely moving, like the little sky above the collar. The mountain lights were happiness possessed, sure of recurrence. But these skies, never to return, begged for remembrance. The dry cold deepened, bringing sleep. Drunk, she felt now, with sleep; dizzy with gazing, and still there was no sign of the end. They were climbing a narrow track between a smooth high drift, a greying wall of snow, and a precipice sharply falling. An opening; the floor of a wide valley. Mountains hemming it, exposed from base to summit, moving by as the sleigh sped along the level to where a fenced road led upwards. Up this steep road they went in a slow zig-zag that brought the mountains across the way now right now left, and a glimpse ahead against the sky of a village, angles and peaks of low buildings sharply etched, quenched by snow, crushed between snow and snow, and in their midst the high snow-shrouded cone of a little church; Swiss village, lost in wastes of snow.