“It will,” declared Philip.  “The signs point to a glorious winter, crisp and dry—­the sledge and dog kind, when you can hear the crack of a whiplash half a mile away.”

“You will hear that frequently enough if you follow Josephine,” chuckled Adare.  “Not a trail in these forests for a hundred miles she does not know.  She trains all of the dogs, and they are wonderful.”

It was on the point of Philip’s tongue to ask a reason for the silence of the fierce pack he had seen the night before, when he caught himself.  At the same moment the Indian woman appeared through the door with a laden tray.  Adare helped her arrange their breakfast on a small table near the fire.

“I thought we would be more congenial here than alone in the dining-room, Philip,” he explained.  “Unless I am mistaken the ladies won’t be up until dinner time.  Did you ever see a steak done to a finer turn than this?  Marie, you are a treasure.”  He motioned Philip to a seat, and began serving.  “Nothing in the world is better than a caribou porterhouse cut well back,” he went on.  “Don’t fry or roast it, but broil it.  An inch and a half is the proper thickness, just enough to hold the heart of it ripe with juice.  See it ooze from that cut!  Can you beat it?”

“Not with anything I have had along the Arctic,” confessed Philip.  “A steak from the cheek of a cow walrus is about the best thing you find up in the ’Big Icebox’—­that is, at first.  Later, when the aurora borealis has got into your marrow, you gorge on seal blubber and narwhal fat and call it good.  As for me, I’d prefer pickles to anything else in the world, so with your permission I’ll help myself.  Just now I’d eat pickles with ice cream.”

It was a pleasant meal.  Philip could not remember when he had known a more agreeable host.  Not until they had finished, and Adare had produced cigars of a curious length and slimness, did the older man ask the question for which Philip had been carefully preparing himself.

“Now I want to hear about you,” he said.  “Josephine told me very little—­said that she wanted me to get my impressions first hand.  We’ll smoke and talk.  These cigars are clear Havanas.  I have the tobacco imported by the bale and we make the cigars ourselves.  Reduces the cost to a minimum, and we always have a supply.  Go on, Philip, I’m listening.”

Philip remembered Josephine’s words telling him to narrate the events of his own life to her father—­except that he was to leave open, as it were, the interval in which he was supposed to have known her in Montreal.  It was not difficult for him to slip over this.  He described his first coming into the North, and Adare’s eyes glowed sympathetically when Philip quoted Hill’s words down at Prince Albert and Jasper’s up at Fond du Lac.  He listened with tense interest to his experiences along the Arctic, his descriptions of the death of MacTavish and the passing of Pierre Radisson.  But what struck deepest with him was Philip’s physical and mental fight for new life, and the splendid way in which the wilderness had responded.