and there grew upon his senses strange delights and reeling agonies. He
heard church bells, he caught at butterflies, he tumbled in new-mown hay,
he wandered in a tropic garden. But in the hay a wasp stung him, and the
butterfly changed to a curling black snake that struck at him and glided
to a dark-flowing river full of floating ice, and up from the river a
white hand was thrust, and it beckoned him--beckoned him. He shut his
eyes and moved towards it, but a voice stopped him, and it said, "Come
away, come away," and two arms folded him round, and as he went back from
the shore he stumbled and fell, and . . . What is this? A yielding mass
at his feet--a mass that stirs! He clutches at it, he tears away the
snow, he calls aloud--and his voice has a faraway unnatural sound--"Gaspe
Toujours! Gaspe Toujours!" Then the figure of a man shakes itself in the
snow, and a voice says: "Ay, ay, sir!" Yes, it is Gaspe Toujours! And
beside him lies Jeff Hyde, and alive. "Ay, ay, sir, alive!"

Jaspar Hume's mind was itself again. It had but suffered for a moment the
agony of delirium.

Gaspe Toujours and Jeff Hyde had lain down in the tent the night of the
great wind, and had gone to sleep at once. The staff had been blown down,
the tent had fallen over them, the drift had covered them, and for three
days they had slept beneath the snow, never waking.

Jeff Hyde's sight was come again to him. "You've come back for the book,"
he said. "You couldn't go on without it. You ought to have taken it
yesterday."

He drew it from his pocket. He was dazed.

"No, Jeff, I've not come back for that, and I did not leave you