“And yet, now that it had come, my spirit had gone down like the sounding lead on a deep-sea bottom. I stood there in the street with a sense of unmitigable loss. Something so sudden and acute that I didn’t myself understand at first what was going on in me. For it was something quite apart from any feeling that I’d like to have been the one to do the thing. There had been for months no question of that. No. It was just a poignant realization that almost the last of the jealous old world’s secrets had been forced out of her keeping. This thing that men had dreamed about before ever they’d girdled the globe—it was no more the stuff of dreams. The thought of Captain Cook and Franklin flashed across my mind, and I remembered the men of the _Jeanette_. But it wasn’t till I remembered the men unborn that I measured the full extent of the disaster. The generations to come would never know what it had stood for—this goal the Norwegian had won. They wouldn’t have to spend even a penny to hear all about it. It would be thrust at them, this shining and terrible thing men had died to gain—one leaden fact the more, conned in a heavy book, stripped to the lean dimensions of a date! Discovery of America, discovery of the Pole—who thrills over these things when they are done? And now the newsboy was coming slowly back, rubbing the mud off my half-crown. In a second I should be reading how the last great stronghold of wonder was destroyed. ‘Well, the world’s grown poorer!’ I said to myself, and I counted my change, thinking less of Nansen’s news than of those men of the future. He had taken from them the finest playground ever found for the imagination—the last great field for grim adventuring. “I opened the paper and read that Nansen had turned back before reaching the eighty-seventh parallel. “The Pole was still to be found.” * * * * * Ah, Bella, when you saw that look go traveling so far, so far, you must have known that he would follow. Poor little Bella! Under those vision-filled eyes, the crippled dog, still sleeping, made a muffled sound. “Ky is dreaming,” said the sick man, absently, “that she hears a seal crying ‘Ho-o-o,’ with his nose above the ice. Or she thinks she hears the ‘Kah! kah! sah! sah!’ of the auks. So do I, sometimes.” “But you promised ‘the face’ you wouldn’t think of the arctic any more.”