nd all
because of _her_--the golden goddess who had laughed at him in her room,
whose laughter would never die out of his ears. He gritted his teeth;
his hands clenched under his blankets; a surge of anger swept through
him--for an instant it was almost hatred. Was it possible that she--that
woman who had been his wife--could chain him now, enslave his thoughts,
fill his mind, his brain, his body, _after what had happened?_ Why was
it that he could not rise up and laugh and shrug his shoulders, and
thank God that, after all, there had been no children? Why couldn't he
do that? _Why? Why?_

A long time afterward he seemed to be asking that question. He seemed to
be crying it out aloud, over and over again, in a strange and mysterious
wilderness; and at last he seemed to be very near to a girl who was
standing on a rock waiting for him; a girl who bent toward him like a
wonderful flower, her arms reaching out, her lips parted, her eyes
shining through the glory of her windswept hair as she listened to his
cry of "_Why? Why?_"

He slept. It was a deep, cool sleep; a slumber beside a shadowed pool,
with the wind whispering gently in strange tree tops, and water rippling
softly in a strange stream.

CHAPTER VI

Sunshine followed storm. The winter sun was cresting the tree tops when
Thoreau got out of his bed to build a fire in the big stove. It was nine
o'clock, and bitterly cold. The frost lay thick upon the windows, with
the sun staining it like the silver and gold of old cathedral glass, and
as the fox breeder opened the cabin door to look at his thermometer he
heard the snap and crack of that cold in the trees outside, and in the
timbers of the log walls. He always looked at the thermometer before he
built his fire--a fixed habit in him; he wanted to know, first of all,
whether it had been a good night for his foxes, and whether it had been
too cold for the furred creatures of the forest to travel. Fifty degrees
below zero was bad for fisher and marten and lynx; on such nights they
preferred the warmth of snug holes and deep windfalls to full stomachs,
and his traps were usually empty. This morning it was forty-seven
degrees below zero. Cold enough! He turned, closed the door, shivered.
Then he stopped halfway to the stove, and stared.

Last night, or rather in that black part of the early day when they had
gone to bed, Father Roland had warned him to make no noise in the
morning; that they would let David