Dale's struggle ended there when he faced his soul. To understand himself was to be released from strain, worry, ceaseless importuning doubt and wonder and fear. But the fever of unrest, of uncertainty, had been nothing compared to a sudden upflashing torment of love. With somber deliberation he set about the tasks needful, and others that he might make--his camp-fires and meals, the care of his pets and horses, the mending of saddles and pack-harness, the curing of buckskin for moccasins and hunting-suits. So his days were not idle. But all this work was habit for him and needed no application of mind. And Dale, like some men of lonely wilderness lives who did not retrograde toward the savage, was a thinker. Love made him a sufferer. The surprise and shame of his unconscious surrender, the certain hopelessness of it, the long years of communion with all that was wild, lonely, and beautiful, the wonderfully developed insight into nature's secrets, and the sudden-dawning revelation that he was no omniscient being exempt from the ruthless ordinary destiny of man--all these showed him the strength of his manhood and of his passion, and that the life he had chosen was of all lives the one calculated to make love sad and terrible. Helen Rayner haunted him. In the sunlight there was not a place around camp which did not picture her lithe, vigorous body, her dark, thoughtful eyes, her eloquent, resolute lips, and the smile that was so sweet and strong. At night she was there like a slender specter, pacing beside him under the moaning pines. Every camp-fire held in its heart the glowing white radiance of her spirit. Nature had taught Dale to love solitude and silence, but love itself taught him their meaning. Solitude had been created for the eagle on his crag, for the blasted mountain fir, lonely and gnarled on its peak, for the elk and the wolf. But it had not been intended for man. And to live always in the silence of wild places was to become obsessed with self--to think and dream--to be happy, which state, however pursued by man, was not good for him. Man must be given imperious longings for the unattainable. It needed, then, only the memory of an unattainable woman to render solitude passionately desired by a man, yet almost unendurable. Dale was alone with his secret; and every pine, everything in that park saw him shaken and undone. In the dark, pitchy deadness of night, when there was no wind and the cold on the peaks had frozen the waterfall, then the silence seemed insupportable. Many hours that should have been given to slumber were paced out under the cold, white, pitiless stars, under the lonely pines. Dale's memory betrayed him, mocked his restraint, cheated him of any peace; and his imagination, sharpened by love, created pictures, fancies, feelings, that drove him frantic.