He pushed together yet more closely the burning sticks of his little fire and bent over to read. It was very little that he saw written, but it spoke to him like a voice in the night:
Come back to me—ah, come back! I need you. I implore you to return!
There was no address, no date, no signature. There was no means of telling whence or how this letter had come to him, more than any of the others.
Go back to her—how could he, now? It was more than a year since these words had been written! What avail now, if he did return? No, he had delayed, he had gone on, and he had cost her—what? Perhaps her happiness as well as his own, perhaps the success of herself and of many others, perhaps his own success in life. Against that, what could he measure?
The white mountains on ahead made no reply to him. The stars glowed cold and white above him, but they seemed like a thousand facets of pitiless light turned upon his soul.
The quavering howl of a wolf on a near by eminence sounded like a voice to him, mocking, taunting, fiendish. Never, it seemed to him, had any man been thus unhappy. Even the wilderness had failed him! In a land of desolation he sat, a desolate soul.