Perhaps the sweet memory of Sophie Carr’s warm lips on his had something to do with this.

At any rate he rose after a little and followed the creek bank to a point well down stream, whence he crossed through the fringe of timber to his cabin.

CHAPTER X

THE WAY OF A MAID WITH A MAN

Between the queer mixture of emotions which beset him and the discomfort of his bruised face and over-strained body Thompson turned and twisted, and sleep withheld its restful oblivion until far in the night.  As a consequence he slept late.  Dawn had grown old before he wakened.

When he opened his cabin door he was confronted by the dourest aspect of the north that he had yet seen.  The sky was banked full of slate-gray clouds scudding low before a northeast wind that droned its melancholy song in the swaying spruce tops, a song older than the sorrows of men, the essence of all things forlorn in its minor cadences.  A gray, clammy day, tinged with the chill breath of coming snow.  Thompson missed the sun that had cheered and warmed those hushed solitudes.  Just to look at that dull sky and to hear the wind that was fast stripping the last sere leaves from willow and maple and birch, and to feel that indefinable touch of harshness, the first frigid fingerings of the frost-gods in the air, gave him a swift touch of depression.  He shivered a little.  Turning to his wood box he hastened to build a fire in the stove.

He stoked that rusty firebox until by the time he had cooked and eaten breakfast it was glowing red.  When he sat with his feet cocked up on the stove front and gave himself up to the sober business of thought, it seemed to him that he was passing a portentous milestone.  To his unsophisticated mind the simple fact that Sophie Carr had permitted him to kiss her, that for a moment her head with its fluffy aureole of yellow hair had rested willingly upon his shoulder, created a bond between them, an understanding, a tentative promise, a cleaving together that could have but one conclusion.  He found himself reflecting upon that—­to him—­most natural conclusion with a peculiar mixture of gladness and doubt.  For even in his exaltation he could not visualize Sophie Carr as an ideal minister’s helpmate.  He simply could not.  He could hear too plainly the scorn of her tone as she spoke of “parasitical parsons”, of “unthinking acceptance of priestly myths”, of the Church, his Church, as “an organization essentially materialistic in its aims and activities”, and many more such phrases which were new and startling to Thompson, even if they had been current among radical thinkers long enough to become incorporated in a great deal that has been written upon philosophy and theology.