Yes the world, his world, had changed. Of all that he had known through youth and early manhood only his wife--like the sea and the mountains--remained steadfast, a desirable reality. Now, more than ever, he was filled with gratitude and wonder that she had stood loyal, devoted, staunch as a rock in the bewildering flux of a period that seemed to him, in occasional somber moods, to have quickened the disintegration of men and the cherished works of men to a degree that made him apprehensive. This couldn't be the reality of things, he assured himself. He had somehow got them twisted. His vision and his understanding must be askew. He had to stop pondering about it all. It was difficult for him to do this. He had always been a thinking being. That faculty had cursed him in France. On duty in trenches, in action, in long lonely vigils, his mind had hammered him with insistent questions and speculations on the why and the wherefore of human activities. Many an answer that came like the answer to a sum saddened him. One should not see too clearly. He found it so now. But at least he, as an individual, was not too deeply involved to stand clear of all this feverish hurrying and scurrying to nowhere after nothing. There must be something a man could do in the world that would bring him dividends in satisfaction of accomplishment, as well as dollars. For him, because his forbears had been both adventurous and far-seeing, there was no immediate economic pressure. He had no great responsibilities, beyond himself and Mary and their boy. If he needed more than the minor share which he held in the Norquay estate, he could surely get it without bowing his head and twisting his moral sense awry before the Moloch of commerce. The more he saw of town the more he desired to turn his back on it. Not because it was town but because for so long he had had his fill of noise and motion. To sit amid a great silence, the strange, restful hush of a forest, in the shadow of great mountains,--that calm, secure peace; to hear only the sighing of wind in high interlaced branches, the muted song of running water, the whistle of birds' wings,--that was his wish. Practical wisdom forbade. There was really one place where he longed to be with Mary and his son, and they could not go there. Hawk's Nest was no longer his home. It was Grove's. His road and Grove's diverged too sharply for him to go there even as a guest. Elsewhere they could not find comfort at that season. It was a winter of sleet and snow, of alternate frosts and rains. A half-sick man couldn't go camping like a pioneer with a woman and a child. And it was not camping as such that Rod longed for, he knew, as the spacious background and comfortable security of his birthplace. Whereupon, as a sensible man eschews the unattainable, he put it out of his mind. In the spring,--he and Mary lay awake nights planning what they would do in the spring.