about the affair.  It was he who started the coffin I told you of, and he’s been left quite alone because this tale frightened men from coming to work for him in the winter as usual.  I have a very comfortable berth here.  I think there must have been something curious—­a streak of some kind—­in the dead man’s family; his only daughter went off from here in a rage a few days after his death, and as the snow came at once, she is supposed to have perished in the drifts on the hills.  Our logs have to be floated down the small river here at the spring flood, and this man, Bates, is determined to look for the lost girl at the same time.  I’ll stay and see him through the spring.  Very likely I shall look in on you in summer.”

Alec Trenholme went to bed not a little sleepy, but satisfied that he had given a clear account of the greater part of what had befallen him.

The next day he tramped as far as the railway to post the letter.

When Principal Trenholme received this letter he was standing in his library, holding an interview with some of his elder pupils.  He had a pleasant manner with boys; his rule was to make friends with them as much as possible; and if he was not the darling of their hearts, he was as dear to them as a pedagogue ever is to a class under his authority.  When he saw Alec’s letter, his heart within him leaped with hope and quailed with fear.  It is only a few times during his life that a man regards a letter in this way, and usually after long suspense on a subject which looms large in his estimate of things.  When he could disengage himself, he tore it open, and the first question with which he scanned it concerned Alec only—­was he in trouble? had he carried out his threat of evil-doing? or was it well with him?

Robert Trenholme was not now merely of the stuff of which men of the world are made.  Could we but know it, a man’s mind probably bears to his religion no very different relation from what his body bears; his creed, opinions, and sentiments are more nearly allied to what St. Paul calls “the flesh” than they are to the hidden life of the man, with which God deals.  To the inner spring of Robert Trenholme’s life God had access, so that his creed, and the law of temperance in him, had, not perfection, but vitality; and the same vitality, now permitted, now refused, by unseen inlets flowed into all he did and was, and his estimate of things was changed.  He, in subtle selfishness, did much, almost all he could, to check and interrupt the incoming life, although indeed he prayed, and often supposed his most ardent desire was, to obtain it.  Such is the average man of faith; such was Robert Trenholme—­a better thing, truly, than a mere man, but not outwardly or inwardly so consistent.

The great fear he had when he opened this letter was that he had caused his brother to stumble; the great hope, that, because of his prayers, Heaven would grant it should not be so; but when, on the first hasty glance over the pages, he discovered that Alec was well, and was apparently amusing himself in a harmless way, that fear and hope instantly glided into the background; he hardly knew that they had both been strong, so faded did they look in the light of the commonplace certainty.