up in the 'Big Icebox'--that is, at first. Later, when the aurora
borealis has got into your marrow, you gorge on seal blubber and
narwhal fat and call it good. As for me, I'd prefer pickles to anything
else in the world, so with your permission I'll help myself. Just now
I'd eat pickles with ice cream."

It was a pleasant meal. Philip could not remember when he had known a
more agreeable host. Not until they had finished, and Adare had
produced cigars of a curious length and slimness, did the older man ask
the question for which Philip had been carefully preparing himself.

"Now I want to hear about you," he said. "Josephine told me very
little--said that she wanted me to get my impressions first hand. We'll
smoke and talk. These cigars are clear Havanas. I have the tobacco
imported by the bale and we make the cigars ourselves. Reduces the cost
to a minimum, and we always have a supply. Go on, Philip, I'm
listening."

Philip remembered Josephine's words telling him to narrate the events
of his own life to her father--except that he was to leave open, as it
were, the interval in which he was supposed to have known her in
Montreal. It was not difficult for him to slip over this. He described
his first coming into the North, and Adare's eyes glowed
sympathetically when Philip quoted Hill's words down at Prince Albert
and Jasper's up at Fond du Lac. He listened with tense interest to his
experiences along the Arctic, his descriptions of the death of
MacTavish and the passing of Pierre Radisson. But what struck deepest
with him was Philip's physical and mental fight for new life, and the
splendid way in which the wilderness had responded.

"And you couldn't go back now," he said, a tone of triumph in his
voice. "When the forests once claim you--they hold."

"Not alone the forests, Mon Pere."

"Ah, Mignonne. No, there is neither man nor beast in the world that
would leave her. Even the dogs are chained out in the deep spruce that
they may not tear down her doors in the night to come near her. The
whole world loves my Josephine. The Indians make the Big Medicine for
her in a hundred tepees when they learn she is ill. They have trimmed
five hundred lob-stick trees in her memory. Mon Dieu, in the Company's
books there are written down more than thirty babes and children grown
who bear her name of Josephine! She is different than her mother.
Miriam has been always like a flower--a timid wood violet, loving this
big world