He replaced the skull on the table to point to an isolated shelf filled with books and magazines.

“—­there is my most remarkable collection,” he added, a gleam of humour in his eyes.  “They are the books and magazine stories of nature fakirs, the ‘works’ of naturalists who have never heard the howl of a wolf or the cry of a loon; the wild dreams of fictionists, the rot of writers who spend two weeks or a month each year on some blazed trail and return to the cities to call themselves students of nature.  When I feel in bad humour I read some of that stuff and laugh.”

He leaned over to press a button under the table,

“One of my little electrical arrangements,” he explained.  “That will bring our breakfast.  To use a popular expression of the uninformed, I’m as hungry as a bear.  As a matter of fact, you know, a bear is the lightest eater of all brute creation for his size, strength, and fat supply.  That row of naturalists over there have made him out a pig.  The beast’s a genius, for it takes a genius to grow fat on poplar buds!”

Then he laughed good humouredly.

“I suppose you are tired of this already.  Josephine has probably been filling you with a lot of my foolishness.  She says I must be silly or I would have my stuff published in books.  But I am waiting, waiting until I have come down to the last facts.  I am experimenting now with the black and the silver fox.  And there are many other experiments to come, many of them.  But you are tired of this.”

“Tired!”

Philip had listened to him without speaking.  In this room John Adare had changed.  In him he saw now the living, breathing soul of the wild.  His own face was flushed with a new enthusiasm as he replied: 

“Such things could never tire me.  I only ask that I may be your companion in your researches, and learn something of the wonders which you must already have discovered.  You have studied wild animals—­for twenty years?”

“Twenty and four, day and night; it has been my hobby.”

“And you have written about them?”

“A score of volumes, if they were in print.”

Philip drew a deep breath.

“The world would give a great deal for what you know,” he said.  “It would give a great deal for those books, more than I dare to estimate, undoubtedly it would be a vast sum in dollars.”

Adare laughed softly in his beard.

“And what would I do with dollars?” he asked.  “I have sufficient with which to live this life here.  What more could money bring me?  I am the happiest man in the world!”

For a moment a cloud overshadowed his face.

“And yet of late I have had a worry,” he added thoughtfully.  “It is because of Miriam, my wife.  She is not well.  I had hoped that the doctors in Montreal would help her.  But they have failed.  They say she possesses no malady, no sickness that they can discover.  And yet she is not the old Miriam.  God knows I hope the tonic of the snows will bring her back to health this winter!”