work of a word, let a gesture suffice.

All this Granger had learnt during the fortnight which he had lived
with his wife; in watching her, he had studied to forego his former
turbulence of mind as a thing most foolish, and had determined to sink
down into the dull acceptance of a destiny against which it was
profitless to contend--a kind of resigned contentment. If he was to be
hanged to-morrow for Strangeways' death, that was no reason why he
should disturb himself to-day; if that was to happen, it would come to
pass in any case,--nothing that he might do or say could prevent it.
The momentary pain of dying is usually much less intense than the
hours of cowardly suffering which men bring upon themselves by
prevising the anguish of their last departure, so he told himself. So
to-day he sat outside his store in the sunshine and smoked his pipe,
the freest and silentest man in all Keewatin, and, he would have had
himself believe, the most stably contented.

That night, when he had left Pere Antoine and had gone to consult the
dead man at the bend, had been the turning-point in his frenzy. It
seemed to him, as he looked back, to have happened long ago when he
was little more than a child, at a time before his enlightenment, when
he had supposed very foolishly that he was of importance to God and to
his fellow-men. Now he had come to know that he was of no importance
even to himself. He blew out a cloud of smoke and watched it vanish in
the air; in other days he would have smiled, but it was not worth the
effort now. The relation of that whiff of tobacco-smoke to the
unplumbed space, throughout which it would be dispersed, was about the
same as that of his present existence to the rest of the world.

When, having said good-bye to Strangeways, he had followed the Man
with the Dead Soul back to the store, he had made up his mind to the
inevitable, and had been prepared to greet Peggy with a certain
display of joy. Before ever he could put his thought into action, his
intention had been repelled. As he had drawn nearer to the crazy
wooden pier which ran out from Murder Point, he had seen the shadowy
shapes of the trapper and his daughter, bending down, unloading their
canoe, moving slowly hither and thither through the night. As he had
come up, he had hailed them. To his call Beorn had made no reply, had
only turned his head and nodded, while Peggy, stooping over a pile of
furs, had thrown him the customary salutation of t