all the world would ever know, except himself--and perhaps one
other.





CHAPTER II


Outside Kent's window was Spring, the glorious Spring of the
Northland, and in spite of the death-grip that was tightening in
his chest he drank it in deeply and leaned over so that his eyes
traveled over wide spaces of the world that had been his only a
short time before.

It occurred to him that he had suggested this knoll that
overlooked both settlement and river as the site for the building
which Dr. Cardigan called his hospital. It was a structure rough
and unadorned, unpainted, and sweetly smelling with the aroma of
the spruce trees from the heart of which its unplaned lumber was
cut. The breath of it was a thing to bring cheer and hope. Its
silvery walls, in places golden and brown with pitch and freckled
with knots, spoke joyously of life that would not die, and the
woodpeckers came and hammered on it as though it were still a part
of the forest, and red squirrels chattered on the roof and
scampered about in play with a soft patter of feet.

"It's a pretty poor specimen of man that would die up here with
all that under his eyes," Kent had said a year before, when he and