your
everlasting fortune in the face."

They now all roared together again, and at Sherbrooke they changed cars.

Northwick had to change too, but he did not try to get into the same car
with them. He wanted to think, to elaborate in his own mind the
suggestion for his immediate and remoter future which he had got from
their talk; and he dreaded the confusion, and possibly he dreaded the
misgiving, that might come from hearing more of their talk. He thought
he knew, now, just what he wanted to do, and he did not wish to be
swerved from it.

He felt eager to get on, but he was not impatient. He bore very well the
long waits that he had to make both at Sherbrooke and Richmond; but when
the train left the Junction for Quebec at last, he settled himself in
his seat with a solider content than he had felt before, and gave
himself up to the pleasure of shaping the future, that was so obediently
plastic in his fancy. The brakeman plied the fierce stove at the end of
the car with fuel, and Northwick did not suffer from the cold that
strengthened and deepened with the passing night outside, though he was
not overcoated and booted for any such temperature as his
fellow-travellers seemed prepared for. They were all Canadians, and they
talked now and then in their broad-vowelled French, but their voices
were low, and they came and went quietly at the country stations. The
car was old and worn, and badly hung; but in spite of all, Northwick
drowsed in the fervor of the glowing stove, and towards morning he fell
into a long and dreamless sleep.

He woke from it with a vigor and freshness that surprised him, and found
the train pulling into the station at Pointe Levis. The sun burned like
a soft lamp through the thick frost on the car-window; when he emerged,
he found it a cloudless splendor on a world of snow. The vast landscape,
which he had seen in summer all green from the edge of the mighty rivers
to the hilltops losing themselves in the blue distance, showed rounded
and diminished in the immeasurable drifts that filled it, and that hid
the streams in depths almost as great above their ice as those of the
currents below. The villages of the _habitans_ sparkled from tinned roof
and spire, and the city before him rose from shore and cliff with a
thousand plumes of silvery smoke. In and out among the frozen shipping
swarmed an active life that turned the rivers into highroads, and
speckled the expanse of glistening white with si