white apparition was had given him a queer jolt, stirring unsuspected things in imagination and in memory.  He had been accustomed to see that symbol all his life, and it had never spoken to him before.  Up here it cried aloud and dominated the scene.  “Humph!” he said to himself, “to look at you a body’d think ‘The Origin’ had never been written, and Spencer and Huxley had never been born.’  He knocked again, and again turned about to scan the cross.

“Just as much a superstition, just as much a fetich as Kaviak’s seal-plug or the Shaman’s eagle feather.  With long looking at a couple of crossed sticks men grow as dazed, as hypnotized, as Pymeuts watching a Shaman’s ivory wand.  All the same, I’m not sure that faith in ’First Principles’ would build a house like this in the Arctic Regions, and it’s convenient to find it here—­if only they’d open the door.”

He gave another thundering knock, and then nearly fell backwards into the snow, for Brother Paul stood on the threshold holding up a lamp.

“I—­a—­oh!  How do you do?  Can I come in?”

Brother Paul, still with the look of the Avenging Angel on his pale, young face, held the door open to let the Boy come in.  Then, leaning out into the night and lifting the lamp high, “Is that Nicholas?” he said sternly.

But the Pymeuts and the school-boys had vanished.  He came in and set down the lamp.

“We—­a—­we heard you were going down river,” said the Boy, tamely, for he had not yet recovered himself after such an unexpected blow.

“Are you cold?  Are you wet?” demanded Brother Paul, standing erect, unwelcoming, by the table that held the lamp.

The Boy pulled himself together.

“Look here”—­he turned away from the comforting stove and confronted the Jesuit—­“those Pymeuts are not only cold and wet and sick too, but they’re sorry.  They’ve come to ask forgiveness.”

“It’s easily done.”

Such scorn you would hardly expect from a follower of the meek Galilean.

“No, not easily done, a penance like this.  I know, for I’ve just travelled that thirty miles with ’em over the ice from Pymeut.”

“You?  Yes, it amuses you.”

The sombre eyes shone with a cold, disconcerting light.

“Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve been better amused.”

The Boy looked down at his weary, wounded feet.  And the others—­where were his fellow pilgrims?  It struck him as comic that the upshot of the journey should be that he was doing penance for the Pymeuts, but he couldn’t smile with that offended archangel in front of him.

“Thirty miles over the ice, in the face of a norther, hasn’t been so ‘easy’ even for me.  And I’m not old, nor sick—­no, nor frightened, Brother Paul.”

He flung up his head, but his heart failed him even while he made the boast.  Silently, for a moment, they confronted each other.

“Where are you bound for?”