six months dead should be
seen to stir within his coffin of glass. Here and there in the expanse
of forest he could see flashes of green and brown, of tree-tops from
which the snow had fallen. The river-banks, which yesterday had seemed
chiselled out of solid marble, were to-day tunnelled and scarred with
tiny rills and watercourses which groped their way feebly riverwards.
As he stood in silence meditating, he was startled by the whirr of
wings, and looking southward descried the advance-guard of the first
flock of ducks. "Ha, the spring has come," he cried; but immediately
he checked his ecstasy, for his eyes had again caught sight of the
emotionless expression on that great white face with its closed eyes
turned toward the sun. Though no voice spoke it seemed to him to say,
making by its silence its meaning plain, "There is nothing of which
the importance is so great that we should forsake our calm."

He felt rebuked for vulgarity, as though he had been found shouting in
a cathedral-nave where priests were praying for the peace of souls of
the departed. He desired to hide himself; entering his shack, he
pushed to the door. He was tired; his brain ached with thought, and
his thought was disjointed. He could not believe that Spurling had
ever come; it was all an hallucination. Thinking about the past had
made him imagine all that, or else he had dreamed it in the night. He
went over detail by detail all that had seemed to him to happen; and
even then, when it fitted reasonably together, he could not be
certain. It was too monstrous that Spurling should have become like
that! He would not believe it. Then his anxiety for Mordaunt sprang up
and commenced to craze him. The terrible question throbbed through his
mind, "Is Mordaunt dead?"

The mania for questions grew upon him. Three separate voices spoke
clamorously at once: "Is Mordaunt dead?"

"Did Spurling murder him?"

"Am I mad?"

He stumbled to the far end of the room and flung himself down in his
bunk, burying his face in its coverings that he might shut out the
light and gain a moment's rest. But his imaginings followed and knelt
beside him.

"Well, if I must think," he whispered, "I will think of that which is
best." He beckoned from out the shadows his memory of Mordaunt's face,
and gave himself over to recalling all that it once had meant. They
had nicknamed him "The Girl" because of his shyness and modesty, and
had not always been particular in the jok