e answered it was in a voice from which all of
to-day's joyousness had fled.

"I'm going to make your bed, Gloria," he said evenly. "Near the fire,
which I'll keep going. I'll make mine on the outside, so you need not
be afraid of any prowling animal. Then in the morning we will talk."

She watched him go back for his scattered fir-boughs. And even Gloria
noted how heavy was his walk. But she could not guess how when he was
alone with his trees, and the darkness dropped curtainwise between him
and her he went down on both knees and buried his face in one of those
same fallen sprays from the fir.

_Chapter XVIII_

Flat on his back lay Mark King, his hands under his head, his eyes upon
the slow procession of the stars. Just so had he lain many a night in
the forest-land--but life then and now were as two distinct existences
which had nothing in common, but were set apart in two separate worlds,
remote one from the other. Now he saw the stars, as it were, with the
physical eye alone, merely because they blazed so bright against the
darkness above him; he was scarcely conscious of their gleam and
sparkle. Of old he had been wont to commune with them; through the long
years they had woven themselves into his rough-and-ready religion.
Countless times had he watched them and mused and hearkened to the
message which, as with a still voice, infinitely calming, travelled to
him across the limitless vastitude of the universe. Countless times that
voice had called him away from the toils and victories and defeats of
the day, up into a place of quiet from which a man might look about him
with a somewhat truer perspective; he glimpsed futility in much of human
strife and striving; he saw nobility enshrined in a "small" act; he
marked how, set in the scales of the eternal balances of scope and
eternity, a copper penny set against a million dollars were as two
feathers; they rode light, and there was little choice between them. He
had known that firefly cluster of lights above to be the majestic
processional of worlds. He saw himself as small; the universe as big.
And the knowledge did not crush; it elevated. Throughout the whole of
creation ran the fine chain of divine ordinance, of a law that flowered
in beauty. There was God's work above him, about him, within him. And
God stood back of it all, vouching for it, making it good. The spinning
of worlds, the pulses of tides, the course of the blood in his
veins--these were k