The song and cry of bird-life wakened him, and at dawn he bathed in the pool, with dozens of fluffy, new-born ducks dodging away from him among the grasses and reeds.  That day, and the next, and the day after that he traveled steadily into the heart of the tundra country, swiftly and almost without rest.  It seemed to him, at last, that he must be in that country where all the bird-life of the world was born, for wherever there was water, in the pools and little streams and the hollows between the ridges, the voice of it in the morning was a babel of sound.  Out of the sweet breast of the earth he could feel the irresistible pulse of motherhood filling him with its strength and its courage, and whispering to him its everlasting message that because of the glory and need and faith of life had God created this land of twenty-hour day and four-hour twilight.  In it, in these days of summer, was no abiding place for gloom; yet in his own heart, as he drew nearer to his home, was a place of darkness which its light could not quite enter.

The tundras had made Mary Standish more real to him.  In the treeless spaces, in the vast reaches with only the sky shutting out his vision, she seemed to be walking nearer to him, almost with her hand in his.  At times it was like a torture inflicted upon him for his folly, and when he visioned what might have been, and recalled too vividly that it was he who had stilled with death that living glory which dwelt with him in spirit now, a crying sob of which he was not ashamed came from his lips.  For when he thought too deeply, he knew that Mary Standish would have lived if he had said other things to her that night aboard the ship.  She had died, not for him, but because of him—­because, in his failure to live up to what she believed she had found in him, he had broken down what must have been her last hope and her final faith.  If he had been less blind, and God had given him the inspiration of a greater wisdom, she would have been walking with him now, laughing in the rose-tinted dawn, growing tired amid the flowers, sleeping under the clear stars—­happy and unafraid, and looking to him for all things.  At least so he dreamed, in his immeasurable loneliness.

He did not tolerate the thought that other forces might have called her even had she lived, and that she might not have been his to hold and to fight for.  He did not question the possibility of shackles and chains that might have bound her, or other inclinations that might have led her.  He claimed her, now that she was dead, and knew that living he would have possessed her.  Nothing could have kept him from that.  But she was gone.  And for that he was accountable, and the fifth night he lay sleepless under the stars, and like a boy he cried for her with his face upon his arm, and when morning came, and he went on, never had the world seemed so vast and empty.