ing them, said to her father, "Let Conrad wait for a twelvemonth, and if he passes the throw of the Unknown, I will be his bride."
The sun sunk beyond the hills of the Ober-Alp, and with the twilight came a mystic awe over the minds of the villagers. The thoughtful Clothilde fancied the stringer some spiritual guardian: most of all, when she recalled the vow which Conrad had made and had broken. She remarked, moreover, as they went toward their house, that an eagle of the Alps, long after its wonted time of day, hovered over their path, and only when the cottage-door was closed, soured away to the cliffs that lifted above the glaciers of Lauterbrunnen.
The old herdsman began now to regard his daughter with a strange kind of awe. He consulted long and anxiously with the good curé of the village. Could it be that the maid, so near to his heart, was leagued with the spirit-world? He recalled the time when he had met first her mother, wandering upon the mountains. Whence had she come? And was the stranger of the festal day, of some far kindred, who now sought his own? It was remembered how the mother had loved her child, and had borne her in her arms often to the very edge of the glacier, and lulled Clothilde to sleep with the murmur of the deep falls of water, which, in the heats of summer, make mysterious music in the heart of the ice-mountains.
It was remembered how, in girlhood, Clothilde had often wandered thither to pluck Alpine roses, and was heedless always of the icy breath which came from the blue glacier-caverns. Always, too, she hung her votive garlands on the altar of "Our Lady of the Snow," and prayed for the pilgrims, who, in winter, traversed the rude passes of the Ober-Alp. Did the mother belong to the Genius of the Mountain? and was the daughter pledged to the Ice-King again?
The poor old herdsman bowed his hand in prayer; the good curé whispered words of comfort; Clothilde sang as she had sung in the days that were gone, but the old man trembled at her low tones, which thrilled now in his our like the syren sounds, which they say in the Alps, go always before the roar of some great avalanche.
Yet the father's heart twined more and more round the strange spirit-being of Clothilde. It seemed to him, more and more, that the
