He drew a step or two nearer to the open door, and stopped again.  If he returned to question Gregson it would draw him perilously near to explanations which he did not care to make, to the one secret which he wished to guard from his friend’s knowledge.  After all, the picture was only a resemblance.  It could be nothing but a resemblance, even though it was so striking and unusual that it had thrown him off his guard at first.  When he returned later and looked at it again he would no doubt be able to see his error.

He walked on through the spruce shadows and up a narrow trail that led to the bald knob of the ridge, feeling his way with his right hand before him when the denseness of the forest shut out the light of the stars and the moon, until at last he stood out strong and clear under the glow of the skies, with the world sweeping out in black and gray mystery around him.  To the north was the Bay, reaching away like a vast black plain.  Half a mile distant two or three lights were burning over Fort Churchill, red eyes peering up out of the deep pool of darkness; to the south and west there swept the gray, starlit distances which lay between him and civilization.

He leaned against a great rock, resting his elbows in a carpet of moss, and his eyes turned into the mystery of those distances.  The sea of spruce-tops that rose out of the ragged valley at his feet whispered softly in the night wind; from out of their depths trembled the low hoot of an owl; over the vaster desolation beyond hovered a weird and unbroken silence.  More than once the spirit of this world had come to him in the night and had roused him from his slumber to sit alone out under the stars, imagining all that it might tell him if he could read the voice of it in the whispering of the trees, if he could but understand it as he longed to understand it, and could find in it the peace which he knew that it all but held for him.  The spirit of it had never been nearer to him than to-night.  He felt it close to him, so near that it seemed like the warm, vibrant touch of a presence at his side, something which had come to him in a voiceless loneliness as great as his own, watching and listening with him beside the rock.  It seemed nearer to him since he had seen and talked with Gregson.  It was much nearer to him since a few minutes ago, when he had looked upon what he had first thought to be the face of Eileen Brokaw.

And this was the world—­the spirit—­that had changed him.  He wondered if Gregson had seen the change which he tried so hard to conceal.  He wondered if Miss Brokaw would see it when she came, and if her soft, gray eyes would read to the bottom of him as they had fathomed him once before upon a time which seemed years and years ago.  Thoughts like these troubled him.  Twice that day he had found stealing over him a feeling that was almost physical pain, and yet he knew that this pain was but the gnawing of a great loneliness in his heart.  In these