“You don’t know how good it seems to get back home,” he exclaimed, as they shook hands.  “I feel like a boy—­actually like a boy, Philip!  Didn’t sleep two winks after I went to bed, and Miriam scolded me for keeping her awake.  Bless my soul, I wouldn’t live in Montreal if they’d make me a present of the whole Hudson’s Bay Company.”

“Nor I,” said Philip.  “I love the North.”

“How long?”

“Four years—­without a break.”

“One can live a long time in the North in four years,” mused the master of Adare.  “But Josephine said she met you in Montreal?”

“True,” laughed Philip, catching himself.  “That was a break—­and I thank God for it.  Outside of that I spent all of the four years north of the Hight of Land.  For eighteen months I lived along the edges of the Arctic trying to take an impossible census of the Eskimo for the government.”

“I knew something of the sort when I first looked at you,” said Adare.  “I can tell an Arctic man, just as I can pick a Herschel dog or an Athabasca country malemute from a pack of fifty.  We have much to talk about, my boy.  We will be great friends.  Just now we are going to that caribou steak.”

Out into the hall, through another door, and down a short corridor, he led Philip.  Here a third door was open, and Adare stood aside while Philip entered.

“This is my private sanctuary,” he said proudly.  “What do you think of it?”

Philip looked about him.  He was in a room almost as large as the one from which they had come.  In a huge fireplace a pile of logs were blazing.  One end of the room was given up almost entirely to shelves and weighted down with books.  Philip was amazed at their number.  The other end was still partially hidden in glooms but he could make out that it was fitted up as a laboratory, and on shelves he caught the white gleam of scores of wild beast skulls.  Comfortably near to the fire was a large table scattered with books, papers, and piles of manuscript, and behind this was a small iron safe.  Here, Philip thought, was the adytum of no ordinary man; it was the study of a scholar and a scientist.  He marked the absence of mounted heads from the walls, but in spite of that the very atmosphere of the room breathed of the forests and the beast.  Here and there he saw the articulated skeletons of wild animals.  From among the books themselves the jaws and ivory fangs of skulls gleamed out at him.  Before he had finished his wondering survey of the strange room, John Adare stepped to the table and picked up a skull.

“This is my latest specimen,” he said, his voice eager with enthusiasim.  “It is perfect.  Jean secured it for me while I was away.  It is the skull of a beaver, and shows in three distinct and remarkable gradations how nature replaces the soft enamel as it is worn from the beaver’s teeth.  You see, I am a hobbyist.  For twenty years I have been studying wild animals.  And there—­”