can both, in our separate ways, be true to her."

He delayed a moment to have what he had said confirmed; but this time
no token either of dissent or approval was vouchsafed.

CHAPTER XII

HE REVIEWS HIS MARRIAGE, AND IS PUT TO THE TEST

It was the first week in June; for a fortnight John Granger had been a
married man. He was now removed a sufficiently just distance from his
bachelor-hood to be able to estimate the value of the change which
this new step had wrought in his career.

Its true worth to him had been that it had converted him from a
Londoner in Keewatin into a man of the Northland. This might mean,
though it need not, that he had retrograded to a lower type; at all
events it meant that he was robbed of his excuse for considering
himself an exile, bearing himself rebelliously toward his environment,
and being unhappy. By joining himself to Peggy by the rites of the
Roman Church, he had made an irrevocable choice, had slammed the door
of opportunity and return to civilisation in his own face, and had
adopted as his country a land where no one has any use for money or
for time, and where nothing could ever again be of very much
importance. He had not realised all that a fortnight ago when, at the
bidding of the Jesuit, he had made this girl his wife; but since he
had lived in her company he had come to realise. Mercifully there is
no situation, however bad, which may not develop the peculiar virtue
whereby it can be endured. He had learnt his virtue by observing
Peggy, an Indian virtue at that--stolidity. In a great lonely
territory, where men say good-bye to one another for twelve months at
a stretch, and sometimes forever, they arrive at a philosophy of life
which consists in waiting very patiently and unambitiously for the
next thing which the good God may send. To attain this sort of
quietness a man must be quite hopeless, for so long as he hopes he is
liable to disappointment. Also he must live each day as though it were
his first, for to remember things past is to court regret. He must
permit himself to know none of the extremes of emotion, either of joy
or of sadness; to this end he must consider himself as a non-partisan
in life, a careless spectator before whose eyes the groping shadows
pass. The traffic of words is a labour, and a more frequent cause of
misunderstanding than of interpretation--therefore it is wiser, if
peace be desired, to keep always silent. Where a gesture will do the