Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/35



ARGARET delayed over putting away the articles which reminded her of Eric Hedon. She knew it was not because of what the bird had brought that she believed Eric alive; she never at any time had allowed herself to think of him as dead.

If one has become accustomed to consider a missing person as dead one cannot think of that person's doing things; but if one pictures him as lost but still living, one can always look for word to come from him. No one knew better than Margaret Sherwood that most of the men long missing in the Arctic never return. She knew that theirs were the forms in the hewn graves in the ever-frozen ground with the lonely cairns of stone and the driftwood crosses above them buried by the blizzards of winter; theirs were the bones bleaching on the barrens never reached by another man; theirs 21