This was what life required of his last consciousness.  Having attained to it, the greater forces had no more concern with him.  They left him, a poor, weak, naked human soul exposed to the terrors of the North.  For the first time he saw them in all their dreadfulness.  They clutched him with the fingers of cruel suffering so that his body was wracked with the tortures of dissolution.  They flung before his eyes the obscene, unholy shapes of illusion.  They filled his ears with voices.  He was afraid.  He cowered down, covering his eyes with his forearms, and trembled, and sobbed, and uttered little moans.  He was alone in the world, alone with enemies who had him in their power and would destroy him.  He feared to look up.  The man’s spirit was broken.  All the accumulated terrors which his resolute spirit had thrust from him in the long months of struggle, rushed in on him now that his guard was down.  They rioted in the empty chambers of his soul.

“Is it done?” they shrieked in triumph.  “Is it over?  Are you beaten?  Is your spirit crushed?  Is the victory ours?  Is it done?”

Dick shivered and shrank as from a blow.

“Is it done?” the voices insisted.  “Is it over?  Are you beaten?  Is it done?”

The man shrieked aloud in agony.

“Oh, my God!” he cried.  “Oh, yes, yes, yes!  I am beaten.  I can do nothing.  Kill me.  It is done.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

As though these words were a signal, Mack, the hound, who had up to now rested as motionless as though frozen to his place, raised himself on his haunches and gazed earnestly to the north.

In the distance Dick seemed to make out an object moving.  As he had so often done before, by an effort he brought his eyes to focus, expecting, as also had happened so often before, that the object would disappear.  But it persisted, black against the snow.  Its outlines could not be guessed; its distance could not be estimated, its direction of travel could not be determined.  Only the bare fact of its existence was sure.  Somewhere out in the waste it, moving, antithesised these other three black masses on the whiteness, the living man, the living animal, the dead girl.

Dick variously identified it.  At one moment he thought it a marten near at hand; then it became a caribou far away; then a fox between the two.  Finally, instantaneously, as though at a bound it had leaped from indeterminate mists to the commonplace glare of every day, he saw it was a man.

The man was moving painfully, lifting each foot with an appearance of great effort, stumbling, staggering sideways from time to time as though in extreme weakness.  Once he fell.  Then he recovered the upright as though necklaced with great weights.  His hands were empty of weapons.  In the uncertainty of his movements he gradually approached.