or to where he could see dimly through the
trees the uncompleted bulk of his church--and he set down a mental
cipher against that account. It was waste effort. He felt in his heart
that he would never finish it. What was the use?

He tried to whip up the old sense of duty to his calling, to the Church,
to the great good which he had been taught he should accomplish. And he
could muster up nothing but an irritating sense of hollow wordiness in
many of his former dictums and utterances, a vast futility of effort.

Whereupon he at once found himself face to face with a fresh problem, in
which the question of squaring his material needs and queer half-formed
desires with his actions loomed paramount. In other words Mr. Thompson
began, in a fashion scarcely apprehended, upon the painful process of
formulating a philosophy of life that would apply to life as it was
forcing itself upon his consciousness--not as he had hitherto conceived
life to be.

But he was unable to pin himself down to any definite plan. He could not
evolve a clear idea of what to do, nor even of what he wanted to do. And
in the interim he did little save sit about his cabin, deep in
introspection, chop firewood as needed and cook his plain fare--that was
gradually growing plainer, more restricted. Sometimes he varied this by
long solitary tramps through the woods along the brushy bank of Lone
Moose Creek.

This hermit existence he kept up for over a fortnight. He had fought
with Tommy Ashe and he felt diffident about inflicting his company on
Tommy, considering the _casus belli_. Nor could he bring himself to a
casual dropping in on Sam Carr. He shrank from meeting Sophie, from
hearing the sound of her voice, from feeling the tumult of desire her
nearness always stirred up in him. And there was nowhere else to go, no
one with whom he could talk. He could not hold converse with the Crees.
The Lachlan family relapsed into painful stiffness when he entered their
house. There was no common ground between him and them.

He was really marking time until the next mail should arrive at Fort
Pachugan. The days were growing shorter, the nights edged with sharp
frosts. There came a flurry of snow that lay a day and faded slowly in
the eye of the weakening sun.

Mr. Thompson, watching his daily diminishing food supply with sedulous
consideration, knew that the winter was drawing near, a season merciless
in its rigor. He knew that one of these days the northerly