P.S.  Dad says that if you winter at Lone Moose and care to kill a few of the long days you are welcome to help yourself to the books he left.  He will tell Cloudy Moon you are to have them all if you want them, or any of them, any time.

Mr. Thompson folded up the sheets with deliberate precision, replaced them in the envelope and tucked the envelope in his pocket.  He rose to go.  He had a feeling of wanting to escape from that room which those penned pages and swiftly acute memories had filled with a presence it hurt him terribly to recall.  His eye fell upon the rows of Carr’s books, orderly upon their shelves.  The postscript, fresh in his sense-impressions because it came last, and the sight of the books, roused him to a swelling fury of anger.

The heresies of Huxley and Darwin!  The blasphemies of Tom Paine!  The economic diatribes which began with Adam Smith and continued in multiplying volumes down to the latest emanation from professorial intellects in every civilized corner of the earth.  The bulky, bitter tomes of Marx and Engels!  The Lorias and Leacocks, the tribe of Gumplowicz, and Haeckel, the Lubbocks and Burtons, all that vast array of minds which calmly dissect man and his manifold activities, that draw deeply upon every branch of human knowledge to make clear the age-old evolution and revolution in both the physical and intellectual realm—­and which generally leave gods and religions out of account except to analyze them as manifestations of social phenomena.  Those damnable documents which he had never read, but which he had been taught to shun as the product of perverted intellects, blasts of scientific artillery, unkindly trained upon sacred concepts!

He put on his parka hood, gave an abrupt “good evening” to Cloudy Moon, and went out into the night which had deepened its shadows while he sat within.

The North lay hushed and hard under a wan moon.  The teeth of the frost nipped at him.  A wolf lifted a dismal howl as he crossed the meadow.  And his anger died.  That flare of resentment was, he recognized, but a burst of wrath against Sophie, a passionate protest at her desertion.  She had loved him and she had left him, deliberately, calculatingly, left him and love, for the world, the flesh and the devil—­tempted by a fortune untimely directed to her hands.

He did not mind about the books.  Doubtless they were well enough in their way, a source of practical knowledge.  But he did not care a curse about books or knowledge or faith as he walked through the snow across that gleaming white patch in the dusky forest.  His heart cried aloud in forlorn protest against the surging emotions that beset him.  His eyes stung.  And he fought against that inarticulate misery, against the melancholy that settled upon him like a dank mist.

A man must stand upon his own feet!  That stabbed at him, cut across his mood like a slap in the face.  Wasn’t that what he was learning to do?  He lifted his head with a sudden spirit of defiance, a bitter resolution.  A man must stand on his own feet.  Well, he would.  If he could no longer pray and be comforted, he could grit his teeth and struggle and endure.  He had begun to perceive that a man must do that physically—­set his teeth and endure.  In the less concrete matter of the spirit it was much the same.