but
that thing and money were the same, after all: he had proved his love
for his children by making money for them; if he had not loved them so
much he would not have tried to get so much money, and he would not have
been where he was.

His mind fought away from his control, as the sledge slipped along over
the frozen river again. It was very cold, but the full sun on his head
afflicted him like heat. It was the blaze of light that beat up from the
snow, too. His head felt imponderable; and yet he could not hold it up.
It was always sinking forward; and he woke from naps without being sure
that he had been asleep.

He intended to push through that day to Chicoutimi; but his start was so
late that it seemed to him as if they would never get to Haha Bay. When
they arrived, late in the afternoon, all sense of progress thither faded
away; it was as if the starting and stopping were one, or contained in
the same impulse. It might be so if he kept on eleven miles further to
Chicoutimi, but he would not be able to feel it so at the beginning; the
wish could involve its accomplishment only at the end. He said to
himself that this was unreasonable; it was a poor rule that would not
work both ways.

This ran through his mind in the presence of the old man who bustled out
of the door of the cabin where his carriole had stopped. It was larger
than most of the other cabins of the place, which Northwick remembered
curiously well, some with their logs bare, and some sheathed in
birch-bark. He remembered this man, too, when his white moustache, which
branched into either ear, was a glistening brown, and the droop of his
left eyelid was more like a voluntary wink. But the gayety of his face
was the same, and his welcome was so cordial, that a fear of recognition
went through Northwick. He knew the man for the talkative Canadian who
had taken him and his wife a drive over the hills around the bay, in the
morning, when their boat arrived, and afterwards stopped with them at
this cabin, and had them in to drink a glass of milk. Northwick's wife
liked the man, and said she would like to live in such a house in such a
place, and should not be afraid of the winter that he told her was so
terrible. It was almost as if her spirit were there; but Northwick said
to himself that he must not let the man know that he had ever seen him
before. The resolution cost him something, for he felt so broken and
weak that he would have liked to claim his