hat flare of resentment was, he recognized, but a burst
of wrath against Sophie, a passionate protest at her desertion. She had
loved him and she had left him, deliberately, calculatingly, left him
and love, for the world, the flesh and the devil--tempted by a fortune
untimely directed to her hands.

He did not mind about the books. Doubtless they were well enough in
their way, a source of practical knowledge. But he did not care a curse
about books or knowledge or faith as he walked through the snow across
that gleaming white patch in the dusky forest. His heart cried aloud in
forlorn protest against the surging emotions that beset him. His eyes
stung. And he fought against that inarticulate misery, against the
melancholy that settled upon him like a dank mist.

A man must stand upon his own feet! That stabbed at him, cut across his
mood like a slap in the face. Wasn't that what he was learning to do? He
lifted his head with a sudden spirit of defiance, a bitter resolution. A
man must stand on his own feet. Well, he would. If he could no longer
pray and be comforted, he could grit his teeth and struggle and endure.
He had begun to perceive that a man must do that physically--set his
teeth and endure. In the less concrete matter of the spirit it was much
the same.

He turned for a look at the yellow windows of Sam Carr's house. It was a
hollow, empty place now, one that he never wanted to see again, like a
room in which a beloved person has died and from which the body has been
carried away. His eyes lingered on the dim bulk of the house, dusky
black and white like a sketch in charcoal.

"Another bridge burned," he said wistfully to himself.

He faced about, crossed the dividing fringe of timber, passing near the
walls of his unfinished church. A wry smile twisted his lips. That would
remain, the uncompleted monument of his good intentions, the substance
of an unrealizable, impractical dream.

Beyond that, as he came out into his own clearing, he saw a light in
his cabin, where he had left no light. When he came to the door another
toboggan lay beside his own. Strange dogs shifted furtively about at his
approach. Warned by these signs he opened the door full of a curiosity
as to who, in the accustomed fashion of the North, had stopped and made
himself at home.

When the man sitting before the stove with his feet on the rusty front
turned his head at Thompson's entrance, he saw, with a mild turn of
surprise, that