ed wi' you," he observed, after
an appraising glance. "How goes the good work at Lone Moose?"

"There are difficulties," Thompson responded with an unintentional
touch of ambiguity. "But I daresay I'll manage in time to overcome
them."

He discovered in himself a disinclination to talk about his labors in
that field.

MacLeod smiled and forbore to press the subject. There were sundry
parcels for Sam Carr, a letter or two, and a varied assortment of
magazines. Thompson took these, after tarrying overnight at the post,
and started home, refusing MacLeod's cordial invitation to stay over a
day or two. He would be back again when the next mail was due, a matter
of four or five weeks. And late that same evening, by dint of a
favorable breeze that kept the canoe flying, and some hard pulling up
Lone Moose Creek, Thompson and the breed boy reached home.

Young Lachlan went off to his cabin. Mr. Thompson conscientiously lugged
the assortment of parcels and magazines over to Sam Carr's house, duly
delivered the three letters to Carr himself, and--for reasons that he
could not define as anything but an unwarrantable access of
shyness--declining the first invitation he had ever received to break
bread at Carr's table, hurried back to his own primitive quarters.
Perhaps the fact that Sophie Carr, curled up in a big chair, smiled at
him in a way that made his pulses quicken had something to do with his
hasty retreat. He was wary of the impulses and emotions she never failed
to stir in him when he was near her. There were times when he suspected
that she was aware of this power--which in his naive conception of women
he believed almost uncanny in her--and that she amused herself by
exercising it upon him. And he resented that.

So he did not stay long enough to observe Carr lay two of his letters on
the table after a brief glance, and sit looking fixedly at the third,
which by the length of envelope and thickness of enclosure might
conceivably have contained some document of a legal or official nature.

Carr looked at this letter a long time before he tore it open. He took a
still longer time to peruse its contents. He sat for several minutes
thereafter turning the sheets over and over in his lean fingers, until
in fact he became aware that his daughter's eyes were fixed on him with
a lively curiosity in their gray depths.

"What is it, Dad?" she asked, as he tucked envelope and foolscap pages
into the inside pocket of his co