Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/480

478 Resolution alone. He bad known long since that Tempest was in charge of the Mackenzie District now; and he had heard from the steamer, which he met near Simpson, that letters were waiting him in Tempest's care. Those letters haunted the day and the night for him now. Dear though Jennifer was to him, much though she meant and always would mean in his life, he knew that no possible tenderness of hers could quite atone for the public disgrace which might fall on him. And for more than the disgrace—for the pain and the heartache it would be to him to know the North no more.

For all she had given him to bear his heart glowed yet with love for this great sweeping space of Northland. Her wild and lavish glory of young summer stirred the undying wild youth in himself. He could never leave her without a heartbreak. But he knew that he would never come back if his dishonour had gone down these mighty rivers before him. On the last evening before he reached Fort Resolution he camped in a spruce clump redolent with piny odours, and with an outlook upon the lake. The turquoise and raw gold of the quivering sunset across that rimless reach of faintly rolling water seemed more glorious than he had ever seen it before. His own life was just as horizonless at present, and there was none of that beauty in it, and yet there was a new-sprung hope and pleasure in him that used not to be there. He was hoping because he dared not do anything else. He was trying to believe because he dared not do anything else. And this is really the one and only reason which makes a man in earnest.

Lulled there in the lap of that great silence with only his pipe for company the radiance of the sunset held more meaning, the brooding calm of the deepening sky held more, the occasional scuffling and splash of the ducks in the reeds held more. He seemed to have stumbled on some new understanding and comradeship with that mighty Life which pulsed through everything, and yet he could not tell how and where he felt in touch with it. But he carried a courageous heart into Fort Resolution next day, and he received his letter and the news that Tempest would be back in a couple of hours with a like serenity. Then, because he dared not read those letters out in the breezy day with