Trenholme retraced his steps on the road from Turrif’s door to a point nearer his old railway-station; then he put on his snow-shoes and set out for the gap in the hills that led to the Bates and Cameron clearing.  As he mounted the soft snow that was heaped by the roadside and struck out across the fields, his heart bounded with a sense of power and freedom, such as a man might have who found means to walk upon the ocean.  Little need had he of map or guide to mark the turning or crossing of his road; the gap in the hills was clear to his eyes fifteen miles away; the world was white, and he strode across it.  When the earth is made up of pearl-dust and sunshine, and the air is pure as the air of heaven, the heart of man loses all sense of effort, and action is as spontaneous as breath itself.  Trenholme was half-way to the hills before he felt that he had begun his day’s journey.

When he got past the unbroken snow of the farm lands and the blueberry flats, the white surface was broken by the tops of brushwood.  He did not take the line of the straight corduroy road; it was more free and exciting to make a meandering track wherever the snow lay sheer over a chain of frozen pools that intersected the thickets.  There was no perceptible heat in the rays the sun poured down, but the light was so great that where the delicate skeletons of the young trees were massed together it was a relief to let the eye rest upon them.

That same element of pleasure, relief, was found also in the restful deadness of the wooded sides of the hills when he came near them.  Grey there was of deciduous trees in the basin of the river, and dull green of spruce firs that grew up elsewhere.  Intense light has the effect of lack of light, taking colour from the landscape.  Even the green of the fir trees, as they stood in full light on the hill summits, was faded in comparison with the blue beyond.

This was while he was in the open plain; but when he walked into the forest, passing into the gap in the hills, all was changed.  The snow, lightly shadowed by the branches overhead, was more quiet to the sight, and where his path lay near fir trees, the snow, where fell their heavy shade, looked so dead and cold and grey that it recalled thoughts of night-time, or of storm, or of other gloomy things; and this thought of gloom, which the dense shadow brought, had fascination, because it was such a wondrous contrast to the rest of the happy valley, in which the sunbeams, now aslant, were giving a golden tinge to the icy facets of crags, to high-perched circling drifts, to the basin of unbroken snow, to the brown of maple trunks, and to the rich verdure of the very firs which cast the shadow.