Sam Carr had delivered himself of this as a wind-up to a conversation with Thompson the evening before.  Now, while his forgotten biscuits scorched and he listened to Tommy Ashe and Sophie Carr taking their toll of meat from the flocks of waterfowl, he was thinking over what Carr had said.  He dissented.  Oh, he dissented with a vigor that was almost bitterness, because the smiling quirk of Sam Carr’s lips when he uttered the last sentence gave it something of a personal edge.  However it was meant, Thompson could not help taking it that way.  And Mr. Thompson’s desire was to give—­to give lavishly.  Only here in this forsaken corner of the world he seemed to have nothing to give that was of any value.

He was, at the same time, discovering in himself personal needs to which he had never given a thought, sordid everyday necessities the satisfaction of which had always been at hand, unquestioned, taken for granted much as one takes the sun and the air for granted.  His meals had been provided.  His bed had been provided.  The funds which had clothed and educated him and trained him for the ministry had been provided, and likewise his transportation to the scene of his endeavors.  How, he had not known except in the vaguest way, he had not particularly inquired, any more than the child inquires the whence and the why of luscious berries he finds growing upon a bush in the garden.

Not until he was torn by the roots out of the old, ordered environment and flung headlong into an environment where cause and effect are linked close did he consider these things.  Materially he was getting a first-hand lesson in economics—­and domestic science of a sort!  Spiritually he was a little bit aghast, amazed that the Almighty did not personally intervene to save a man from his own inefficiency.  He began to grasp the hitherto unnoted fact that meals and a bed and fires and clothes and all the other stark necessities involved labor of the hands, skilful exercise of the thought-function.

If this was so, he, Wesley Thompson, twenty-five years of age and a minister of the gospel, was deeply in debt—­unless he denied the justice of giving value for value received.  He had received much; he had returned nothing except perfunctory thanks.  And what had he to give?  Even to him, transcendent as was his faith that the glory of man was but the reflected glory of God, that faith was not a commodity to be bartered.

He did not think these things in these terms.  He found himself becoming involved in a maze of speculation, in which he could only grope feebly for words to define the unrest that was in him.

While he sat at his small table of rough-hewn boards with his scorched, unappetizing biscuits, ill-cooked potatoes and bacon, and a pot of tea that he could never brew to his liking (and Mr. Thompson, from a considerable amount of juggling afternoon teacups, had acquired a nice taste in that beverage) he saw Tommy Ashe and Sophie Carr pass along one edge of his clearing, a cluster of bright-winged ducks slung over Tommy’s shoulder, their voices floating across to him as if they came down a long corridor.  They disappeared toward Lone Moose through the timber, and Mr. Thompson sat brooding over his lonely meal until he realized with a start that his mind was concentrating upon Sophie Carr with a disturbing insistence.