ed Milt Dale's peace, had confounded his
philosophy of self-sufficient, lonely happiness in the solitude of the
wilds, had forced him to come face to face with his soul and the fatal
significance of life.

When he realized his defeat, that things were not as they seemed, that
there was no joy for him in the coming of spring, that he had been blind
in his free, sensorial, Indian relation to existence, he fell into
an inexplicably strange state, a despondency, a gloom as deep as the
silence of his home. Dale reflected that the stronger an animal, the
keener its nerves, the higher its intelligence, the greater must be its
suffering under restraint or injury. He thought of himself as a high
order of animal whose great physical need was action, and now the
incentive to action seemed dead. He grew lax. He did not want to move.
He performed his diminishing duties under compulsion.

He watched for spring as a liberation, but not that he could leave the
valley. He hated the cold, he grew weary of wind and snow; he imagined
the warm sun, the park once more green with grass and bright with
daisies, the return of birds and squirrels and deer to heir old haunts,
would be the means whereby he could break this spell upon him. Then he
might gradually return to past contentment, though it would never be the
same.

But spring, coming early to Paradise Park, brought a fever to Dale's
blood--a fire of unutterable longing. It was good, perhaps, that
this was so, because he seemed driven to work, climb, tramp, and keep
ceaselessly on the move from dawn till dark. Action strengthened his lax
muscles and kept him from those motionless, senseless hours of brooding.
He at least need not be ashamed of longing for that which could never
be his--the sweetness of a woman--a home full of light, joy, hope, the
meaning and beauty of children. But those dark moods were sinkings into
a pit of hell.

Dale had not kept track of days and weeks. He did not know when the snow
melted off three slopes of Paradise Park. All he knew was that an age
had dragged over his head and that spring had come. During his restless
waking hours, and even when he was asleep, there seemed always in the
back of his mind a growing consciousness that soon he would emerge from
this trial, a changed man, ready to sacrifice his chosen lot, to give up
his lonely life of selfish indulgence in lazy affinity with nature,
and to go wherever his strong hands might perform some real ser