 While staying at a hotel in the Swiss Alps, Mark Cavendidge is asked to break some bad news to the only other British guest in the hotel, Mrs. Stella Ballister: her husband of six months has perished on the mountain top, dying from exposure and exhaustion. Unfortunaltely, an attempt to recover his remains fails when his body falls into a deep crevasse. Over the following years Mark very much falls in love with Stella but she will not marry him. She is waiting for the days when her husband s body will re-appear, pushed down the mountain by the advancing glacier. Forty years later, she does finally recover his body, but also a surprise that affects her deeply.