d was
smoking a big pipe. That he had been up for some time was evident from
the logs fully ablaze in the fireplace. He rubbed his hands briskly as
Philip entered. Every atom of him disseminated good cheer.

"You don't know how good it seems to get back home," he exclaimed, as
they shook hands. "I feel like a boy--actually like a boy, Philip!
Didn't sleep two winks after I went to bed, and Miriam scolded me for
keeping her awake. Bless my soul, I wouldn't live in Montreal if they'd
make me a present of the whole Hudson's Bay Company."

"Nor I," said Philip. "I love the North."

"How long?"

"Four years--without a break."

"One can live a long time in the North in four years," mused the master
of Adare. "But Josephine said she met you in Montreal?"

"True," laughed Philip, catching himself. "That was a break--and I
thank God for it. Outside of that I spent all of the four years north
of the Hight of Land. For eighteen months I lived along the edges of
the Arctic trying to take an impossible census of the Eskimo for the
government."

"I knew something of the sort when I first looked at you," said Adare.
"I can tell an Arctic man, just as I can pick a Herschel dog or an
Athabasca country malemute from a pack of fifty. We have much to talk
about, my boy. We will be great friends. Just now we are going to that
caribou steak."

Out into the hall, through another door, and down a short corridor, he
led Philip. Here a third door was open, and Adare stood aside while
Philip entered.

"This is my private sanctuary," he said proudly. "What do you think of
it?"

Philip looked about him. He was in a room almost as large as the one
from which they had come. In a huge fireplace a pile of logs were
blazing. One end of the room was given up almost entirely to shelves
and weighted down with books. Philip was amazed at their number. The
other end was still partially hidden in glooms but he could make out
that it was fitted up as a laboratory, and on shelves he caught the
white gleam of scores of wild beast skulls. Comfortably near to the
fire was a large table scattered with books, papers, and piles of
manuscript, and behind this was a small iron safe. Here, Philip
thought, was the adytum of no ordinary man; it was the study of a
scholar and a scientist. He marked the absence of mounted heads from
the walls, but in spite of that the very atmosphere of the room
breathed of the forests and the beast. Here and there he saw the