Then came the long, wonderful ride southward day after day along the coast to Port Dupré, a ride from headland to headland across the frozen bays behind long teams of straining, furry dogs, that leapt and yelped as they ran. Sometimes over the land the brutes shirked and loitered and called for the whip; they were a quarrelsome crew to keep waiting; but across the sea-ice they went like the wind, and downhill the komatic chased their waving tails. The sledges swayed and leapt depressions, and shot athwart icy stretches. The Traffords, spectacled and wrapped to their noses, had all the sensations then of hunting an unknown quarry behind a pack of wolves. The snow blazed under the sun, out to sea beyond the ice the water glittered, and it wasn't so much air they breathed as a sort of joyous hunger. One day their teams insisted upon racing. Marjorie's team was the heavier, her driver more skillful, and her sledge the lighter, and she led in that wild chase from start to finish, but ever and again Trafford made wild spurts that brought him almost level. Once, as he came alongside, she heard him laughing joyously. "Marjorie," he shouted, "d'you remember? Old donkey cart?" Her team yawed away, and as he swept near again, behind his pack of whimpering, straining, furious dogs, she heard him shouting, "You know, that old cart! Under the overhanging trees! So thick and green they met overhead! You know! When you and I had our first talk together! In the lane. It wasn't so fast as this, eh?"... § 7 At Port Dupré they stayed ten days--days that Marjorie could only make tolerable by knitting absurd garments for the children (her knitting was atrocious), and then one afternoon they heard the gun of the _Grenfell_, the new winter steamer from St. John's, signalling as it came in through the fog, very slowly, from that great wasteful world of men and women beyond the seaward grey. THE END * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious punctuation and hyphenation inconsistencies have been silently repaired. Words with variable spelling have been retained. The following spelling and typographical emendations have been made: