Peter Fern was crazy about mountains. Climbing was the  1 of his life. Church towers£¬seaside cliffs, rock faces, ice mountains£¬anything “If it is there” , he used to say, “then I want to climb it.”

So the news of his marriage gave me a   2 . £¬Peter Fern a married man! I couldn't 4 it. I 5 whether his wife would try to stop some of his risky   6 .I’d never known him to take much interest in   3 . Well

She was French perhaps--from that place  7  he usually spent his holidays. Chamonix£¬wasn’t it? From Chamonix he'd climbed Mount Blanc on his seventeenth birthday, and another one the day after! That was it, then: She was French£¬from a mountaineering family. No  8 . No other explanation.

A month later I met them  9 ¡¡  .in town. Anna surprised me—because she was English. She was a dancer in the   10