Probably, in his heat to argue, he had spoken too quickly for the Frenchman to take in all his words.  That his drift was understood and pondered on was evident from the slow answer.

“It would be good for Monsieur Bates, but poor for you.”

“I’m not going to turn my back on this country and leave the fellow in that pickle.  I should feel as if his blood were on my head.”

“Since?”

“How since?”

“Since what day did you have his care on you?  Last time you came you did not mean sen to help him.”  It was true, but so strongly did Trenholme see his point that he had not realised how new was the present aspect of the case to him.

“Well,” said he, meaning that this was not a matter of importance.

“But why?” said Turrif again.

“Oh, I don’t know.”  Trenholme looked down at his moccasined feet.  “I thought” (he gave a laugh as if he were ashamed) “I’d turn over a new leaf this year, and do something that’s more worth doing.  I was well enough off here so far as looking out for myself was concerned.”

Turrif looked at him with kind and serious disapproval.

“And when will you begin to live se life of a man?”

“How do you mean—­’a man’?”

“When will you make money and get married?”

“Do you think time is all wasted when one isn’t making money and getting married?”

“For a boy, no; for a man, yes.”

Trenholme rose.  “Good-bye, and thank you for all your hospitality,” said he.  “I’ll come back in spring and tell you what I’m going to do next.”

He was moving out, when he looked again at the little shrine in the middle of the wall, the picture of the Virgin, and, below, the little altar shelf, with its hideous paper roses.  He looked back as it caught his eye, arrested, surprised, by a difference of feeling in him towards it.

Noticing the direction of Trenholme’s glance, the Frenchman crossed himself.

It was a day of such glory as is only seen amid Northern snowfields.  Alec Trenholme looked up into the sky, and the blue of other skies that he remembered faded beside it, as the blue of violets fades beside the blue of gentian flowers.  There was no cloud, no hint of vapour; the sky, as one looked for it, was not there, but it was as if the sight leaped through the sunlit ether, so clear it was, and saw the dark blue gulfs of space that were beyond the reach of the sun’s lighting.  The earth was not beyond the reach of the sunlight, and in all that wide white land, in mile after mile of fields, of softened hillock and buried hollow, there was not a frozen crystal that did not thrill to its centre with the sunlight and throw it back in a soft glow of myriad rays.