"And when will you begin to live se life of a man?"
"How do you mean—'a man'?"
"When will you make money and get married?"
"Do you think time is all wasted when one isn't making money and getting married?"
"For a boy, no; for a man, yes."
Trenholme rose. "Good-bye, and thank you for all your hospitality," said he. "I'll come back in spring and tell you what I'm going to do next."
He was moving out, when he looked again at the little shrine in the middle of the wall, the picture of the Virgin, and, below, the little altar shelf, with its hideous paper roses. He looked back as it caught his eye, arrested, surprised, by a difference of feeling in him towards it.
Noticing the direction of Trenholme's glance, the Frenchman crossed himself.
It was a day of such glory as is only seen amid Northern snowfields. Alec Trenholme looked up into the sky, and the blue of other skies that he remembered faded beside it, as the blue of violets fades beside the blue of gentian flowers. There was no cloud, no hint of vapour; the sky, as one looked for it, was not there, but it was as if the sight leaped through the sunlit ether, so clear it was, and saw the dark blue gulfs of space that were beyond the reach of the sun's lighting. The earth was not beyond the reach of the sunlight, and in all that wide white land, in mile after mile of fields, of softened hillock and buried hollow, there was not a frozen crystal that did not thrill to its centre with the sunlight and throw it back in a soft glow of myriad rays.
Trenholme retraced his steps on the road from Turrif's door to a point nearer his old railway-station; then he put on his snow-shoes and set out for the gap in the hills that led to the Bates and Cameron clearing. As he mounted the soft snow that was heaped by the roadside and struck out across the fields, his heart bounded with a sense of power and freedom, such as a man might have who found means to walk upon the ocean. Little need had he of map or guide to mark the turning or crossing of his road; the gap in the hills was clear to his eyes fifteen miles away; the world was white, and he strode across it. When the earth is made up of pearl-dust and sunshine, and the air is pure as the air of heaven, the heart of man loses all sense of effort, and action is as spontaneous as breath itself. Trenholme was half-way to the hills before he felt that he had begun his day's journey.