certain were the only loves he had ever wanted to hold and kiss. This wild creed which he had taught himself had done him no good. But he could not fling it aside. It did not seem possible now that Tempest could ever give way to a newer friend; Jennifer to a newer love. And yet such things had been his experience all through life. Constancy is more an ingrained habit than a natural virtue, and Dick had never cultivated habits.
He kicked the fire together, and re-lit his pipe. Okimow, lying near his feet, looked up, then buried his nose in his paws again with a snort of comfort. That half-smile in the man's eyes had meant nothing to him. Because he had no soul he could not laugh at the fears and aspirations of that soul.
And yet Dick was not altogether indifferent concerning the uniform he wore and the country which he served. After all, it was the land which had bred him; the land which his gay, daring forefathers had won for him, paying lightly and unregretfully with the price of their lives. And this work which he was doing would have appealed to them too. This work of guarding a young and empty land into which alien races were constantly pouring: races which knew strange gods and practised strange customs; races which became naturalised by a swift system which they understood in the letter only, and which accepted responsibilities which they many times had neither the wit nor the knowledge to understand.
He realised quite certainly that it was for the men born of Canada to help her aliens through with their unhandy fingering of a life that was new and strange. And, in chief, it was for those men on whom had been laid the charge of bearing the law of the English across and across the solitudes; sowing the loneliness thick with it, so that, wherever the feet of the new-come wanderer might tread, there he should find it waiting him. Waiting on the river sands where the prospector bores for oil among the spores of the wolf and the bear. Waiting on the blowing blue-joint grass-lands where the coyote wakes the far hollow echoes, and in the settler's little log shack the business of life and of death goes forward. Waiting for the communities
