ielding mass at his feet--a mass that stirs! He
clutches at it, he tears away the snow, he calls aloud--and his voice
has a faraway unnatural sound--"Gaspe Toujours! Gaspe Toujours!" Then
the figure of a man shakes itself in the snow, and a voice says: "Ay,
ay, sir!" Yes, it is Gaspe Toujours! And beside him lies Jeff Hyde, and
alive. "Ay, ay, sir, alive!"

Jaspar Hume's mind was itself again. It had but suffered for a moment
the agony of delirium.

Gaspe Toujours and Jeff Hyde had lain down in the tent the night of
the great wind, and had gone to sleep at once. The staff had been blown
down, the tent had fallen over them, the drift had covered them, and for
three days they had slept beneath the snow, never waking.

Jeff Hyde's sight was come again to him. "You've come back for the
book," he said. "You couldn't go on without it. You ought to have taken
it yesterday."

He drew it from his pocket. He was dazed.

"No, Jeff, I've not come back for that, and I did not leave you
yesterday: it is three days and more since we parted. The book has
brought us luck, and the best. We have found our man; and they'll be
here to-night with him. I came on ahead to see how you fared."

In that frost-bitten world Jeff Hyde uncovered his head for a moment.
"Gaspe Toujours is a papist," he said, "but he read me some of that book
the day you left, and one thing we went to sleep on: it was that about
'Lightenin' the darkness, and defendin' us from all the perils and
dangers of this night.'" Here Gaspe Toujours made the sign of the cross.
Jeff Hyde continued half apologetically for his comrade: "That comes
natural to Gaspe Toujours--I guess it always does to papists. But I
never had any trainin' that way, and I had to turn the thing over and
over, and I fell asleep on it. And when I wake up three days after,
here's my eyes as fresh as daisies, and you back, sir, and the thing
done that we come to do."

He put the Book into Hume's hands and at that moment Gaspe Toujours
said: "See!" Far off, against the eastern horizon, appeared a group of
moving figures.

That night the broken segments of the White Guard were reunited, and
Clive Lepage slept by the side of Jaspar Hume.

VI

Napoleon might have marched back from Moscow with undecimated legions
safely enough, if the heart of those legions had not been crushed. The
White Guard, with their faces turned homeward, and the man they had
sought for in their care, seemed to have acqu