“Yes,” and weakness of the flesh or weight of memory held him a moment silent. “She always said that if the Norwegian had been successful she and I would never have quarreled. She wrote that in every letter after I left her. I don’t know. She was very young. She never understood”—he glanced at Hildegarde—“never understood what was the most interesting place on the map. She thought it was Paris.” He smiled. “Maybe she was right. I don’t know. All I do know is”—and a subtle animation invaded voice and air—“a few weeks after I read Nansen’s news in the London street, Borisoff came across from Christiana to talk things over. All this time that I had been looking at the face he had been building a ship as good, he said, as the _Fram_. No man would dare say more. He had made agreements with a crew and company of picked men, some of them his old whaling people. He had news that the Finlander we’d sent the year before to Siberia, after Olenek dogs, would be waiting with the pack up there on that bleak shore, between Chelyuskin and the Kara Sea—‘waiting for you and me,’ said Borisoff.” The sick man’s eyes were shining. “Borisoff was a tremendous fellow! I never knew but one person who didn’t believe in Borisoff. You couldn’t expect a girl—” he broke off. “But the great bond between him and me was that we both had that passion for the North, that is like nothing else on earth in the way of land love. Talk of the South! A man loves the South as he loves a soft bed and the warm corner by the fire. But he loves the North as he loves his prey.” He brought one hand away from his beard and he fastened it afresh in the knotted oilskin at his side, with an air of one about to rise up and continue his journey. “Well, one day I said to Borisoff, ‘Of course _we_ can’t do the damned thing if Nansen couldn’t—so come along, and let’s try!’ “We sailed from Tromsö that July.