fruitful.

The cloud of disaster slowly began to lift. Nothing stands still.
Nothing can stand still. The power of life moves on inexorably. It
brings with it its disasters and its joys, but they are all passing
emotions, and are of so small account in the tremendous scheme being
slowly worked out by an Infinite Power.

The blow which had fallen on Jessie Mowbray had robbed her for the
moment of all joy in the coming of John Kars. But her love was deep
and real, and, for all her sorrow, she had neither power nor desire to
deny it. In her darkest moments there was a measure of comfort in it.
It was something on which she could lean for support. Even in her
greatest depths of suffering it buoyed her, all unknown, perhaps, but
nevertheless.

So, as the days passed, and the booming of the glacier thundered under
the warming spring sunlight, she yearned more and more for the gentle
sympathy which she knew he would readily yield. Thus it came that Kars
one day beheld her on the landing, gazing at the work which was going
on under his watchful eye.

It was the revelation he had awaited. That night he conferred with
Bill, with the resulting decision of a start to be made within two days.

The wonder of it. God's world. A world of life and hope. The winter
of Nature's despair driven forth beyond the borders to the outland
drear of eternal northern ice. The blue of a radiant sky, flecked with
a fleece, white as driven snow, frothing waves tossed on the bosom of a
crisp spring breeze. The sun playing a delicious hide-and-seek, at
moments flashing its brilliant eye, and setting the channels of life
pulsating with hope, and again lost behind its screen of alabaster,
that only succeeded in adding to its promise.

As yet the skeleton arms of the winter woods remained unclad. But wild
duck and geese were on the wing, sweeping up from the south in search
of the melting sloughs and flooded hollows, pastures laid open to them
by the rapid thaw. The birth of the new season was accomplished, and
the labor of mother earth was a memory.

They were at the bank of the river again. They were in the heart of
the willow glade, still shorn of its summer beauty. The man was
standing, large, dominating before her, but obsessed by every unmanly
fear. The girl was sitting on a fallen tree-trunk, whose screen of
tilted roots set up a barrier which shut her from the view of the
frowning glances of the aged Fort above them, and