knew at last, knew that finally he had
rounded out the circle of his domain.

This was what life required of his last consciousness. Having attained
to it, the greater forces had no more concern with him. They left him, a
poor, weak, naked human soul exposed to the terrors of the North. For
the first time he saw them in all their dreadfulness. They clutched him
with the fingers of cruel suffering so that his body was wracked with
the tortures of dissolution. They flung before his eyes the obscene,
unholy shapes of illusion. They filled his ears with voices. He was
afraid. He cowered down, covering his eyes with his forearms, and
trembled, and sobbed, and uttered little moans. He was alone in the
world, alone with enemies who had him in their power and would destroy
him. He feared to look up. The man's spirit was broken. All the
accumulated terrors which his resolute spirit had thrust from him in the
long months of struggle, rushed in on him now that his guard was down.
They rioted in the empty chambers of his soul.

"Is it done?" they shrieked in triumph. "Is it over? Are you beaten? Is
your spirit crushed? Is the victory ours? Is it done?"

Dick shivered and shrank as from a blow.

"Is it done?" the voices insisted. "Is it over? Are you beaten? Is it
done?"

The man shrieked aloud in agony.

"Oh, my God!" he cried. "Oh, yes, yes, yes! I am beaten. I can do
nothing. Kill me. It is done."

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

As though these words were a signal, Mack, the hound, who had up to now
rested as motionless as though frozen to his place, raised himself on
his haunches and gazed earnestly to the north.

In the distance Dick seemed to make out an object moving. As he had so
often done before, by an effort he brought his eyes to focus, expecting,
as also had happened so often before, that the object would disappear.
But it persisted, black against the snow. Its outlines could not be
guessed; its distance could not be estimated, its direction of travel
could not be determined. Only the bare fact of its existence was sure.
Somewhere out in the waste it, moving, antithesised these other three
black masses on the whiteness, the living man, the living animal, the
dead girl.

Dick variously identified it. At one moment he thought it a marten near
at hand; then it became a caribou far away; then a fox between the two.
Finally, instantaneously, as though at a bound it had leaped from
indeterminate mists to the commonp