last the snowfall ceased and packed, traveling even with their aid
would be a heart-breaking business.

Virginia was lonely and depressed all the time Bill was absent, and she
had a moment of self-amazement at the rapidity with which she brightened
up at his return. But it was a natural development: the snow-swept
wilds were dreary indeed for a lonely soul. He was a fellow human
being; that alone was relationship enough.

"You can call me Virginia, if you want to," she told him. "Last names
are silly out here--Heaven knows we can't keep them up in these weeks
to come. I've called you Bill ever since the night we crossed the
river."

Bill looked his gratitude, and she helped him prepare the meat. Some of
it he hung just outside the cabin door; one of the great hams suspended
in a spruce tree, fifty feet in front of the cabin. The skin was
fleshed and hung up behind the stove to dry.

"It's going to furnish the web of our snowshoes," he explained.

That night their talk took a philosophical trend, and in the candlelight
he told her some of his most secret views. She found that the North,
the untamed land that had been his home, had colored all his ideas, yet
she was amazed at his scientific knowledge of some subjects.

Far from the influence of any church, she was surprised to find that he
was a religious man. In fact, she found that his religion went deeper
than her own. She belonged to one of the Protestant churches of
Christianity, attended church regularly, and the church had given her
fine ideals and moral precepts; but religion itself was not a reality to
her. It was not a deep urge, an inner and profound passion as it was
with him. She prayed in church, she had always prayed--half
automatically--at bedtime; but actual, entreating prayer to a literal
God had been outside her born of thought. In her sheltered life she had
never felt the need of a literal God. The spirit of All Being was not
close to her, as it was to him.

Bill had found his religion in the wilderness, and it was real. He had
listened to the voices of the wind and the stir of the waters in the
fretful lake; he had caught dim messages, yet profound enough to flood
his heart with passion, in the rustling of the leaves, the utter silence
of the night, the unearthly beauty of the far ranges, stretching one
upon another. His was an austere God, infinitely just and wise, but His
great aims were far beyond the power of men's finite min