of snowlands rose out of the obscure
horizon-level to drive past him as the stirless air drove, and
sink away behind into obscure level again. He took no conscious
heed of landmarks, not even when all sign of a path was gone under
depths of snow. His will was set to reach his goal with unexampled
speed; and thither by instinct his physical forces bore him,
without one definite thought to guide.

And the idle brain lay passive, inert, receiving into its vacancy
restless siftings of past sights and sounds: Rol, weeping,
laughing, playing, coiled in the arms of that dreadful Thing:
Tyr--O Tyr!--white fangs in the black jowl: the women who wept on
The foolish puppy, precious for the child's last touch: footprints
from pine wood to door: the smiling face among furs, of such
womanly beauty--smiling--smiling: and Sweyn's face.

"Sweyn, Sweyn, O Sweyn, my brother!"

Sweyn's angry laugh possessed his ear within the sound of the wind
of his speed; Sweyn's scorn assailed more quick and keen than the
biting cold at his throat. And yet he was unimpressed by any
thought of how Sweyn's anger and scorn would rise, if this errand
were known.

Sweyn was a sceptic. His utter disbelief in Christian's testimony
regarding the footprints was based upon positive scepticism. His
reason refused to bend in accepting the possibility of the
supernatural materialised. That a living beast could ever be other
than palpably bestial--pawed, toothed, shagged, and eared as such,
was to him incredible; far more that a human presence could be
transformed from its god-like aspect, upright, free-handed, with
brows, and speech, and laughter. The wild and fearful legends that
he had known from childhood and then believed, he regarded now as
built upon facts distorted, overlaid by imagination, and quickened
by superstition. Even the strange summons at the threshold, that
he himself had vainly answered, was, after the first shock of
surprise, rationally explained by him as malicious foolery on the
part of some clever trickster, who withheld the key to the enigma.

To the younger brother all life was a spiritual mystery, veiled
from his clear knowledge by the density of flesh. Since he knew
his own body to be linked to the complex and antagonistic forces
that constitute one soul, it seemed to him not impossibly strange
that one spiritual force should possess divers forms for widely
various manifestation. Nor, to him, was it great effort to believe
that as