Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/370

368 looked down at Tempest's long hands moving with difficulty among the papers, and looked away again sharply.

"Hellier is making things good and snug here for the winter," he said. "They've hauled no end of wood, and the whole place has been freshly muddied-up. You will be happy as a coon in a hollow tree, Tempest."

"Yes. I wish I could have got through." Tempest's eyes darkened. "Hellier has written the Commissioner, telling him that I'm not fit."

"He'd know that, I imagine. He knows you. And it's going to be a beast of a time. Soft snow and rotten dogs. I've got scratch teams if ever I saw them! Thank the Lord, Myers is a first-class driver, though."

"Yes," said Tempest absently.

He went on reading, and Dick thrust some more wood in the stove; lit his fourth pipe that evening; roamed through the room restlessly, straying at last to the blindless window. He smoked in long breaths, screwing his eyes up, as a painter does in seeking for his values. But he was not thinking of that bold beauty which the snowy night held.

The strained, unnatural mood which had held him for days after that fight with Tempest had gone, as a matter of course. But he could not wholly forget it. He could not forget that for the time he had absolutely believed in a God: that he had cried to that God for help: that he had felt the reality of that God more keenly than he had ever felt anything in his life. He knew that Tempest believed, and he guessed that here lay the secret of Tempest's unclouded eyes and calm forehead, and his patience under pain. But that did not clear the matter for his own mind. Logically, without bias, he had endeavoured to thresh it out, and he could see no reason for belief in an all-prevailing Godhead. The sorrow and the torment of the world was to his understanding clear proof against it, and the comparison between his own virile strength and Tempest's bowed body sharpened that proof until he turned from the struggle bitterly. But over and over again, unbidden, unwelcomed, it came back.

He leaned his knee on the window-sill, staring out with both hands in his pockets. And his face was drawn into