biting cold at his throat. And yet he was unimpressed by any
thought of how Sweyn's anger and scorn would rise, if this errand
were known.

Sweyn was a sceptic. His utter disbelief in Christian's testimony
regarding the footprints was based upon positive scepticism. His
reason refused to bend in accepting the possibility of the
supernatural materialised. That a living beast could ever be other
than palpably bestial--pawed, toothed, shagged, and eared as such,
was to him incredible; far more that a human presence could be
transformed from its god-like aspect, upright, free-handed, with
brows, and speech, and laughter. The wild and fearful legends that
he had known from childhood and then believed, he regarded now as
built upon facts distorted, overlaid by imagination, and quickened
by superstition. Even the strange summons at the threshold, that
he himself had vainly answered, was, after the first shock of
surprise, rationally explained by him as malicious foolery on the
part of some clever trickster, who withheld the key to the enigma.

To the younger brother all life was a spiritual mystery, veiled
from his clear knowledge by the density of flesh. Since he knew
his own body to be linked to the complex and antagonistic forces
that constitute one soul, it seemed to him not impossibly strange
that one spiritual force should possess divers forms for widely
various manifestation. Nor, to him, was it great effort to believe
that as pure water washes away all natural foulness, so water,
holy by consecration, must needs cleanse God's world from that
supernatural evil Thing. Therefore, faster than ever man's foot
had covered those leagues, he sped under the dark, still night,
over the waste, trackless snow-ridges to the far-away church,