came back from THAT!"

He remembered the part he must play.

"Yes, three years of it. If I could only remember as well, only half as
well, things that happened before this--" He raised a hand to his
forehead, to the scar.

"You will," she whispered swiftly. "Derry, darling, you will!"

Wallie sidled in and, with an adoring grin at Mary Josephine, suggested
that he had more coffee and toast ready to serve, piping hot. Keith was
relieved. The day had begun auspiciously, and over the bacon and eggs,
done to a ravishing brown by the little Jap, he told Mary Josephine of
some of his bills of fare in the north and how yesterday he had filled
up on bacon smell at Andy Duggan's. Steak from the cheek of a walrus,
he told her, was equal to porterhouse; seal meat wasn't bad, but one
grew tired of it quickly unless he was an Eskimo; polar bear meat was
filling but tough and strong. He liked whale meat, especially the
tail-steaks of narwhal, and cold boiled blubber was good in the winter,
only it was impossible to cook it because of lack of fuel, unless one
was aboard ship or had an alcohol stove in his outfit. The tidbit of
the Eskimo was birds' eggs, gathered by the ton in summer-time, rotten
before cold weather came, and frozen solid as chunks of ice in winter.
Through one starvation period of three weeks he had lived on them
himself, crunching them raw in his mouth as one worries away with a
piece of rock candy. The little lines gathered in Mary Josephine's
forehead at this, but they smoothed away into laughter when he
humorously described the joy of living on nothing at all but air. And
he added to this by telling her how the gluttonous Eskimo at feast-time
would lie out flat on their backs so that their womenfolk could feed
them by dropping chunks of flesh into their open maws until their
stomachs swelled up like the crops of birds overstuffed with grain.

It was a successful breakfast. When it was over, Keith felt that he had
achieved a great deal. Before they rose from the table, he startled
Mary Josephine by ordering Wallie to bring him a cold chisel and a
hammer from Brady's tool-chest.

"I've lost the key that opens my chest, and I've got to break in," he
explained to her.

Mary Josephine's little laugh was delicious. "After what you told me
about frozen eggs, I thought perhaps you were going to eat some," she
said.

She linked her arm in his as they walked into the big room, snuggling
her head against his shoul