n cast away on the
icy plains, and as the settlement had crept north, had gone north
with it, always on the outer edge of house and field, ever stepping
northward. Here, with small income but high hearts and quiet souls, they
had lived and laboured. And when this newcomer from the old land set his
face northward to an unknown destination, the two women had prayed as
the mother did in the old days when the daughter was but a babe at her
knee, and it was not yet certain that Franklin and his men had been cast
away for ever. Something in him, his great height, his strength of body,
his clear, meditative eyes, his brave laugh, reminded her of him--her
husband--who, like Sir Humphrey Gilbert, had said that it mattered
little where men did their duty, since God was always near to take or
leave as it was His will. When Bickersteth went, it was as though one
they had known all their lives had passed; and the woman knew also that
a new thought had been sown in her daughter's mind, a new door opened in
her heart.

And he had returned. He was now looking down into the valley where
the village lay. Far, far over, two days' march away, he could see
the cluster of houses, and the glow of the sun on the tin spire of the
little Mission Church where he had heard the girl and her mother sing,
till the hearts of all were swept by feeling and ravished by the desire
for "the peace of the Holy Grail." The village was, in truth, but a
day's march away from him, but he was not alone, and the journey could
not be hastened. Beside him, his eyes also upon the sunset and the
village, was a man in a costume half-trapper, half-Indian, with bushy
grey beard and massive frame, and a distant, sorrowful look, like that
of one whose soul was tuned to past suffering. As he sat, his head sunk
on his breast, his elbow resting on a stump of pine--the token of a
progressive civilisation--his chin upon his hand, he looked like the
figure of Moses made immortal by Michael Angelo. But his strength was
not like that of the man beside him, who was thirty years younger.
When he walked, it was as one who had no destination, who had no haven
towards which to travel, who journeyed as one to whom the world is a
wilderness, and one tent or one hut is the same as another, and none is
home.

Like two ships meeting hull to hull on the wide seas, where a few miles
of water will hide them from each other, whose ports are thousands of
miles apart, whose courses are not the