As for his worldly possessions, when Mr. Thompson sardonically considered them as a means of supporting a wife he was forced to admit that the provision would be intolerably meager.  His prospects included a salary that barely sufficed for one.  It was apparent, he concluded, that the Board of Home Missions, like the Army and Navy, calculated its rank and file to remain in single blessedness and subsist frugally to boot.

As to his late accomplishments in the field of labor, Mr. Thompson looked out of his cabin door to where he could see dimly through the trees the uncompleted bulk of his church—­and he set down a mental cipher against that account.  It was waste effort.  He felt in his heart that he would never finish it.  What was the use?

He tried to whip up the old sense of duty to his calling, to the Church, to the great good which he had been taught he should accomplish.  And he could muster up nothing but an irritating sense of hollow wordiness in many of his former dictums and utterances, a vast futility of effort.

Whereupon he at once found himself face to face with a fresh problem, in which the question of squaring his material needs and queer half-formed desires with his actions loomed paramount.  In other words Mr. Thompson began, in a fashion scarcely apprehended, upon the painful process of formulating a philosophy of life that would apply to life as it was forcing itself upon his consciousness—­not as he had hitherto conceived life to be.

But he was unable to pin himself down to any definite plan.  He could not evolve a clear idea of what to do, nor even of what he wanted to do.  And in the interim he did little save sit about his cabin, deep in introspection, chop firewood as needed and cook his plain fare—­that was gradually growing plainer, more restricted.  Sometimes he varied this by long solitary tramps through the woods along the brushy bank of Lone Moose Creek.

This hermit existence he kept up for over a fortnight.  He had fought with Tommy Ashe and he felt diffident about inflicting his company on Tommy, considering the casus belli.  Nor could he bring himself to a casual dropping in on Sam Carr.  He shrank from meeting Sophie, from hearing the sound of her voice, from feeling the tumult of desire her nearness always stirred up in him.  And there was nowhere else to go, no one with whom he could talk.  He could not hold converse with the Crees.  The Lachlan family relapsed into painful stiffness when he entered their house.  There was no common ground between him and them.

He was really marking time until the next mail should arrive at Fort Pachugan.  The days were growing shorter, the nights edged with sharp frosts.  There came a flurry of snow that lay a day and faded slowly in the eye of the weakening sun.

Mr. Thompson, watching his daily diminishing food supply with sedulous consideration, knew that the winter was drawing near, a season merciless in its rigor.  He knew that one of these days the northerly wind would bring down a storm which would blanket the land with snow that only the sun of the next May would banish.  He was ill-prepared to face such an iron-jawed season.