There came a sudden crash of the storm against the window, a shrieking blast of wind and snow, and David stared into the night.  He could see nothing.  It was a black chaos outside.  But he could hear.  He could hear the wailing and the moaning of the wind in the trees, and he almost fancied that it was not darkness alone that shut out his vision, but the thick walls of the forest.

Was that what Father Roland had meant?  Had he asked him to go with him into that?

His face touched the cold glass.  He stared harder.  That morning Father Roland had boarded the train at a wilderness station and had taken a seat beside him.  They had become acquainted.  And later the Little Missioner had told him how those vast forests reached without a break for hundreds of miles into the mysterious North.  He loved them, even as they lay cold and white outside the windows.  There was gladness in his voice when he had said that he was going back into them.  They were a part of his world—­a world of “mystery and savage glory” he had called it, stretching for a thousand miles to the edge of the Arctic, and fifteen hundred miles from Hudson’s Bay to the western mountains.  And to-night he had said, “Will you come with me?”

David’s pulse quickened.  A thousand little snow demons beat in his face to challenge his courage.  The wind swept down, as if enraged at the thought in his mind, and scooped up volley after volley of drifting snow and hurled them at him.  There was only the thin glass between.  It was like the defiance of a living thing.  It threatened him.  It dared him.  It invited him out like a great bully, with a brawling show of fists.  He had always been more or less pusillanimous in the face of winter.  He disliked cold.  He hated snow.  But this that beat and shrieked at him outside the window had set something stirring strangely within him.  It was a desire, whimsical and undecided at first, to thrust his face out into that darkness and feel the sting of the wind and snow.  It was Father Roland’s world.  And Father Roland had invited him to enter it.  That was the curious part of the situation, as it was impressed upon him as he sat with his face flattened against the window.  The Little Missioner had invited him, and the night was daring him.  For a single moment the incongruity of it all made him forget himself, and he laughed—­a chuckling, half-broken, and out-of-tune sort of laugh.  It was the first time in a year that he had forgotten himself anywhere near to a point resembling laughter, and in the sudden and inexplicable spontaneity of it he was startled.  He turned quickly, as though some one at his side had laughed and he was about to demand an explanation.  He looked across the aisle and his eyes met squarely the eyes of a woman.