Whether it was that the man with whom he had been, possessed that power, which great actors involuntarily possess, of imposing their own moods on others, or whether it was that, coming into such strange companionship after his long loneliness, his sympathies were the more easily awakened, Trenholme was suffering from a misery of pity; and in pity for another there weighed a self-pity which was quite new to him.  To have seen the stalwart old man, whose human needs were all so evident to Trenholme’s eyes, but to his own so evidently summed up in that one need which was the theme of the prayer he was offering in obstinate agony, was an experience which for the time entirely robbed him of the power of seeing the elements of life in that proportion to which his mind’s eye had grown accustomed—­that is, seeing the things of religion as a shadowy background for life’s important activities.

The blazing logs through the open stove door cast flickering flamelight upon the young man, who was restlessly warming himself, shifting his position constantly, as a man must who tries to warm himself too hastily.  A traveller read in ancient lore, coming suddenly on this cabin amid its leagues of snow, and looking in to see its light and warmth and the goodly figure of its occupant, might have been tempted to think that the place had been raised by some magician’s wand, and would vanish again when the spell was past.  And to Alec Trenholme, just then, the station to which he was so habituated, the body which usually seemed the larger part of himself, might have been no more than a thought or a dream, so intent was he upon another sort of reality.  He was regardless of it all, even of the heat that, at the same time, scorched him and made him shiver.  He thought of the words that he—­he, Alec Trenholme—­had lifted up his voice to say, waking the echoes of the snow-muffled silence with proclamation of—­He tried not to remember what he had proclaimed, feeling crushed with a new knowledge of his own falseness; and when perforce the thought came upon him of the invisible Actor in the night’s drama whose presence, whose action, he had been so strenuously asserting, he was like a man in pain who does not know what remedy to try; and his mood was tense, he sought only relief.  He essayed one thought and another to reason away the cloud that was upon him; and then he tried saying his prayers, which of late had fallen somewhat into disuse.  It was only by way of a try to see if it would do any good; and he did not give himself much time, for he felt that he must go out again to try to bring in the old man.

Before he had put on his fur cap a second time, however, he heard the whistle of the engine he had been expecting now for nearly twenty-four hours.  It came like a sudden trumpet-sound from the outside world to call him back to his ordinary thoughts and deeds.  For the first moment he felt impatient at it; the second he was glad, for there would certainly be some one with it who could aid him in using force, if necessary, to bring the old man to spend the remainder of the night within doors.