The ridge beyond the coulee out of which Mary Standish had come with wild flowers soon closed like a door between him and Sokwenna’s cabin, and the straight trail to the mountains lay ahead, and over this Alan set the pace, with Tautuk and Amuk Toolik and a caravan of seven pack-deer behind him, bearing supplies for the herdsmen.

Alan had scarcely spoken to the two men.  He knew the driving force which was sending him to the mountains was not only an impulse, but almost an inspirational thing born of necessity.  Each step that he took, with his head and heart in a swirl of intoxicating madness, was an effort behind which he was putting a sheer weight of physical will.  He wanted to go back.  The urge was upon him to surrender utterly to the weakness of forgetting that Mary Standish was a wife.  He had almost fallen a victim to his selfishness and passion in the moment when she stood at Nawadlook’s door, telling him that she loved him.  An iron hand had drawn him out into the day, and it was the same iron hand that kept his face to the mountains now, while in his brain her voice repeated the words that had set his world on fire.

He knew what had happened this morning was not the merely important and essential incident of most human lives; it had been a cataclysmic thing with him.  Probably it would be impossible for even the girl ever fully to understand.  And he needed to be alone to gather strength and mental calmness for the meeting of the problem ahead of him, a complication so unexpected that the very foundation of that stoic equanimity which the mountains had bred in him had suffered a temporary upsetting.  His happiness was almost an insanity.  The dream wherein he had wandered with a spirit of the dead had come true; it was the old idyl in the flesh again, his father, his mother—­and back in the cabin beyond the ridge such a love had cried out to him.  And he was afraid to return.  He laughed the fact aloud, happily and with an unrepressed exultation as he strode ahead of the pack-train, and with that exultation words came to his lips, words intended for himself alone, telling him that Mary Standish belonged to him, and that until the end of eternity he would fight for her and keep her.  Yet he kept on, facing the mountains, and he walked so swiftly that Tautuk and Amuk Toolik fell steadily behind with the deer, so that in time long dips and swells of the tundra lay between them.

With grim persistence he kept at himself, and at last there swept over him in its ultimate triumph a compelling sense of the justice of what he had done—­justice to Mary Standish.  Even now he did not think of her as Mary Graham.  But she was Graham’s wife.  And if he had gone to her in that moment of glorious confession when she had stood at Nawadlook’s door, if he had violated her faith when, because of faith, she had laid the world at his feet, he would have fallen to the level of John Graham himself.  Thought of the narrowness of his escape and of the