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 commonplace glare of every day, he saw it was a man.

The man was moving painfully, lifting each foot with an appearance of great effort, stumbling, staggering sideways from time to time as though in extreme weakness. Once he fell. Then he recovered the upright as though necklaced with great weights. His hands were empty of weapons. In the uncertainty of his movements he gradually approached.

Now Dick could see the great emaciation of his features. The bones of his cheeks seemed to press through his skin, which was leathery and scabbed and cracked to the raw from much frosting. His lips drew tight across his teeth, which grinned in the face of exhaustion like the travesty of laughter on a skull. His eyes were lost in the caverns of their sockets. His thin nostrils were wide, and through them and through the parted lips the breath came and went in strong, rasping gasps, audible even at this distance of two hundred paces. One live thing this wreck of a man expressed. His forces were near their end, but such of them as remained were concentrated in a determination to go on. He moved painfully, but he moved; he staggered, but he always recovered; he fell, and it was a terrible labour to rise, but always he rose and went on.

Dick Herron, sitting there with the dead girl across his knees, watched the man with a strange, detached curiosity. His mind had slipped back into its hazes. The world of phantasms had resumed its sway. He was seeing in thi............