the Point, he paused and gazed back. Already the thaw had commenced; down the still white face of the country, which lay at his feet like a shrouded corpse, the tears had begun to trinkle, though the eyes were tranquil and fast shut; the sight was as astounding to him as if a man six months dead should be seen to stir within his coffin of glass. Here and there in the expanse of forest he could see flashes of green and brown, of tree-tops from which the snow had fallen. The river-banks, which yesterday had seemed chiselled out of solid marble, were to-day tunnelled and scarred with tiny rills and watercourses which groped their way feebly riverwards. As he stood in silence meditating, he was startled by the whirr of wings, and looking southward descried the advance-guard of the first flock of ducks. "Ha, the spring has come," he cried; but immediately he checked his ecstasy, for his eyes had again caught sight of the emotionless expression on that great white face with its closed eyes turned toward the sun. Though no voice spoke it seemed to him to say, making by its silence its meaning plain, "There is nothing of which the importance is so great that we should forsake our calm."[55]

[55]

He felt rebuked for vulgarity, as though he had been found shouting in a cathedral-nave where priests were praying for the peace of souls of the departed. He desired to hide himself; entering his shack, he pushed to the door. He was tired; his brain ached with thought, and his thought was disjointed. He could not believe that Spurling had ever come; it was all an hallucination. Thinking about the past had made him imagine all that, or else he had dreamed it in the night. He went over detail by detail all that had seemed to him to happen; and even then, when it fitted reasonably together, he could not be certain. It was too monstrous that Spurling should have become like that! He would not believe it. Then his anxiety for Mordaunt sprang up and commenced to craze him. The terrible question throbbed through his mind, "Is Mordaunt dead?"

The mania for questions grew upon him. Three separate voices spoke clamorously at once: "Is Mordaunt dead?"

"Did Spurling murder him?"

"Am I mad?"

He stumbled to the far end of the room and flung himself down in his bunk, burying his face in its coverings that he might shut out the light and gain a moment's rest. But his imaginings followed and knelt beside him.

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