conscious of one imperative craving.  That was for a sight of Sophie Carr and a chance to talk to her again.  His heart quickened when he thought of their parting.  He knew she was anything but indifferent.  He was not an egotist, but he knew she harbored a feeling akin to his own, and he built hopes on that, despite her blunt refusal, the logical reasons she had set forth.  He hoped again.  He saw himself in the way of becoming competent—­as the North, which is a keen judge, appraises competence.  He had chucked some of his illusions about relative values.  He conceived that in time he might approximate to Sophie Carr’s idea of a man.

He wanted to see her, to talk with her, to make her define her attitude a little more clearly.  Looking back with his mind a great deal less confused by emotion, he wondered why he had been so dumb, why he had not managed to convey to her that the things she foresaw as denying them happiness or even toleration for each other were not a final state in him, that his ideas and habits and pursuits were in a state of flux that might lead him anywhere.  She had thrown cold water on the flame of his passion.  But he remembered with a glow of happiness that she had kissed him.

He pondered deeply upon this, wondering much at the singular attraction this girl held for him, the mystery of that strange quality that drew him so.  He lacked knowledge of the way and power of women.  It had never touched him before.  It was indeed as if he had been asleep and had wakened with a start.  He was intensely curious about that, curious to know why he, who had met nice girls and attractive women by the score, had come into the North woods to be stirred out of all reason by a slip of a girl with yellow hair and expressive gray eyes and a precocious manner of thinking.

He looked forward eagerly to seeing her again.  He somehow felt a little more sure of himself now.  He could think of a number of things he wished to ask her, of ideas he wanted to expand into speech.  The hurt of her blank refusal had dulled a little.  He could anticipate a keen pleasure just in seeing her.

In the morning he set about outfitting.  He had come down from Porcupine with dogs.  He had seen dog teams bearing the goods and chattels of innumerable natives.  He perceived the essential usefulness of dogs and snowshoes and toboggans in that boundless region of snow.  Canoes when the ice went out, dogs and toboggans when winter came again to lock tight the waterways.  So during his stay at Porcupine he had accepted the gift of a dog from a Cree, traded tobacco for another, and he and Lamont had whiled away the long evenings in making two sets of harness and a small toboggan.  A four-dog team will haul a sizable load.  Two would move all the burden of food and gear that he had in his possession.  He had learned painfully to walk upon snowshoes—­enough so that he was over the poignant ache in the calf of the leg which the North calls mal de racquette.  Altogether he felt himself fully equal to fare into the wilderness alone.  Moreover he had none of that intangible dread of the wilderness which had troubled him when he first came to Lone Moose.