first sensation of its kind he had ever experienced; it was disquieting, and yet soothing; it filled him with an indefinable uneasiness, and yet with a strange yearning.  He stood, in these moments, at the inscrutable threshold of the great North; he felt the enigmatical, voiceless spirit of it; it passed into his blood; it made his heart beat a little faster; it made him afraid, and yet daring.  In his breast the spirit of adventure was waking—­had awakened; he felt the call of the Northland, and it alarmed even as it thrilled him.  He knew, now, that this was the beginning—­the door opening to him—­of a world that reached for hundreds of miles up there.  Yes, there were thousands of miles of it, many thousands; white, as he saw it here; beautiful, terrible, and deathly still.  And into this world Father Roland had asked him to go, and he had as good as pledged himself!

Before he could think, or stop himself, he had laughed.  For an instant it struck him like mirth in a tomb, an unpleasant, soulless sort of mirth, for his laugh had in it a jarring incredulity, a mocking lack of faith in himself.  What right had he to enter into a world like that?  Why, even now, his legs ached because of his exertion in furrowing through a few hundred steps of foot-and-a-half snow!

But the laugh succeeded in bringing him back into the reality of things.  He started at right angles, pushed into the maze of white-robed spruce and balsam, and turned back in the direction of the cabin over a new trail.  He was not in a good humour.  There possessed him an ingrowing and acute feeling of animosity toward himself.  Since the day—­or night—­fate had drawn that great, black curtain over his life, shutting out his sun, he had been drifting; he had been floating along on currents of the least resistance, making no fight, and, in the completeness of his grief and despair, allowing himself to disintegrate physically as well as mentally.  He had sorrowed with himself; he had told himself that everything worth having was gone; but now, for the first time, he cursed himself.  To-day—­these few hundred yards out in the snow—­had come as a test.  They had proved his weakness.  He had degenerated into less than a man!  He was....

He clenched his hands inside his thick mittens, and a rage burned within him like a fire.  Go with Father Roland?  Go up into that world where he knew that the one great law of life was the survival of the fittest?  Yes, he would go!  This body and brain of his needed their punishment—­and they should have it!  He would go.  And his body would fight for it, or die.  The thought gave him an atrocious satisfaction.  He was filled with a sudden contempt for himself.  If Father Roland had known, he would have uttered a paean of joy.