Sweyn was a sceptic.  His utter disbelief in Christian’s testimony regarding the footprints was based upon positive scepticism.  His reason refused to bend in accepting the possibility of the supernatural materialised.  That a living beast could ever be other than palpably bestial—­pawed, toothed, shagged, and eared as such, was to him incredible; far more that a human presence could be transformed from its god-like aspect, upright, free-handed, with brows, and speech, and laughter.  The wild and fearful legends that he had known from childhood and then believed, he regarded now as built upon facts distorted, overlaid by imagination, and quickened by superstition.  Even the strange summons at the threshold, that he himself had vainly answered, was, after the first shock of surprise, rationally explained by him as malicious foolery on the part of some clever trickster, who withheld the key to the enigma.

To the younger brother all life was a spiritual mystery, veiled from his clear knowledge by the density of flesh.  Since he knew his own body to be linked to the complex and antagonistic forces that constitute one soul, it seemed to him not impossibly strange that one spiritual force should possess divers forms for widely various manifestation.  Nor, to him, was it great effort to believe that as pure water washes away all natural foulness, so water, holy by consecration, must needs cleanse God’s world from that supernatural evil Thing.  Therefore, faster than ever man’s foot had covered those leagues, he sped under the dark, still night, over the waste, trackless snow-ridges to the far-away church, where salvation lay in the holy-water stoup at the door.  His faith was as firm as any that wrought miracles in days past, simple as a child’s wish, strong as a man’s will.

He was hardly missed during these hours, every second of which was by him fulfilled to its utmost extent by extremest effort that sinews and nerves could attain.  Within the homestead the while, the easy moments went bright with words and looks of unwonted animation, for the kindly, hospitable instincts of the inmates were roused into cordial expression of welcome and interest by the grace and beauty of the returned stranger.

But Sweyn was eager and earnest, with more than a host’s courteous warmth.  The impression that at her first coming had charmed him, that had lived since through memory, deepened now in her actual presence.  Sweyn, the matchless among men, acknowledged in this fair White Fell a spirit high and bold as his own, and a frame so firm and capable that only bulk was lacking for equal strength.  Yet the white skin was moulded most smoothly, without such muscular swelling as made his might evident.  Such love as his frank self-love could concede was called forth by an ardent admiration for this supreme stranger.  More admiration than love was in his passion, and therefore he was free from a lover’s hesitancy and delicate reserve and doubts.  Frankly and boldly he courted her favour by looks and tones, and an address that came of natural ease, needless of skill by practice.