It had been but an acquaintance of five days while he fitted out for his
expedition, but in this brief time it had sunk deep into his mind that
life was now a thing to cherish, and that he must indeed come back;
though he had left England caring little if, in the peril and danger of
his quest, he ever returned. He had been indifferent to his fate till he
came to the Valley of the Saskatchewan, to the town lying at the foot of
the maple hill beside the great northern stream, and saw the girl whose
life was knit with the far north, whose mother's heart was buried in the
great wastes where Sir John Franklin's expedition was lost; for her
husband had been one of the ill-fated if not unhappy band of lovers of
that civilisation for which they had risked all and lost all save
immortality. Hither the two had come after he had been cast away on the
icy plains, and as the settlement had crept north, had gone north with
it, always on the outer edge of house and field, ever stepping northward.
Here, with small income but high hearts and quiet souls, they had lived
and laboured. And when this newcomer from the old land set his face
northward to an unknown destination, the two women had prayed as the
mother did in the old days when the daughter was but a babe at her knee,
and it was not yet certain that Franklin and his men had been cast away
for ever. Something in him, his great height, his strength of body,
his clear, meditative eyes, his brave laugh, reminded her of him--her
husband--who, like Sir Humphrey Gilbert, had said that it mattered little
where men did their duty, since God was always near to take or leave as
it was His will. When Bickersteth went, it was as though one they had
known all their lives had passed; and the woman knew also that a new
thought had been sown in her daughter's mind, a new door opened in her
heart.

And he had returned. He was now looking down into the valley where the