to the weakness of
forgetting that Mary Standish was a wife. He had almost fallen a victim
to his selfishness and passion in the moment when she stood at
Nawadlook's door, telling him that she loved him. An iron hand had drawn
him out into the day, and it was the same iron hand that kept his face
to the mountains now, while in his brain her voice repeated the words
that had set his world on fire.

He knew what had happened this morning was not the merely important and
essential incident of most human lives; it had been a cataclysmic thing
with him. Probably it would be impossible for even the girl ever fully
to understand. And he needed to be alone to gather strength and mental
calmness for the meeting of the problem ahead of him, a complication so
unexpected that the very foundation of that stoic equanimity which the
mountains had bred in him had suffered a temporary upsetting. His
happiness was almost an insanity. The dream wherein he had wandered with
a spirit of the dead had come true; it was the old idyl in the flesh
again, his father, his mother--and back in the cabin beyond the ridge
such a love had cried out to him. And he was afraid to return. He
laughed the fact aloud, happily and with an unrepressed exultation as
he strode ahead of the pack-train, and with that exultation words came
to his lips, words intended for himself alone, telling him that Mary
Standish belonged to him, and that until the end of eternity he would
fight for her and keep her. Yet he kept on, facing the mountains, and he
walked so swiftly that Tautuk and Amuk Toolik fell steadily behind with
the deer, so that in time long dips and swells of the tundra lay
between them.

With grim persistence he kept at himself, and at last there swept over
him in its ultimate triumph a compelling sense of the justice of what he
had done--justice to Mary Standish. Even now he did not think of her as
Mary Graham. But she was Graham's wife. And if he had gone to her in
that moment of glorious confession when she had stood at Nawadlook's
door, if he had violated her faith when, because of faith, she had laid
the world at his feet, he would have fallen to the level of John Graham
himself. Thought of the narrowness of his escape and of the first mad
desire to call her back from Nawadlook's room, to hold her in his arms
again as he had held her in the cottonwoods, brought a hot fire into his
face. Something greater than his own fighting instinct had turned him