soul of us all. Give us another light, George. I'm blessed if I
can keep the fire in the pipe at all.'

'And this,' thought George, 'is in truth the state of my father's
mind! There are three of us concerned who are all equally dear to
each other, my father, myself, and Marie Bromar. There is not one
of them who doesn't feel that the presence of the others is
necessary to his happiness. Here is my father declaring that the
world will no longer have any savour for him because I am away in
one place, and Marie is to be away in another. There is not the
slightest real reason on earth why we should have been separated.
Yet he,--he alone has done it; and we,--we are to break our hearts
over it! Or rather he has not done it. He is about to do it. The
sacrifice is not yet made, and yet it must be made, because my
father is so unreasonable that no one will dare to point out to him
where lies the way to his own happiness and to the happiness of
those he loves!' It was thus that George Voss thought of it as he
listened to his father's wailings.

But he himself, though he was hot in temper, was slow, or at least
deliberate, in action. He did not even now speak out at once. When
his father's pipe was finished he suggested that they should go on
to a certain run for the fir-logs, which he himself--George Voss--
had made--a steep grooved inclined plane by which the timber when
cut in these parts could be sent down with a rush to the close
neighbourhood of the saw-mill below. They went and inspected the
slide, and discussed the question of putting new wood into the
groove. Michel, with the melancholy tone that had prevailed with
him all the morning, spoke of matters as though any money spent in
mending would be thrown away. There are moments in the lives of