While Virginia cooked lunch, Bill cut young spruce trees and made a sled: and after the meal pushed out through the whirling snow to being in the remainder of the moose meat. It was the work of the whole afternoon to urge the sled up the ridge and then draw it home through the drifts. The snow mantle had deepened alarmingly during the night, and he came none too soon. It was only a matter of days, perhaps of hours, before the snow would be impassable except with snowshoes. Until at last the snowfall ceased and packed, traveling even with their aid would be a heart-breaking business. Virginia was lonely and depressed all the time Bill was absent, and she had a moment of self-amazement at the rapidity with which she brightened up at his return. But it was a natural development: the snow-swept wilds were dreary indeed for a lonely soul. He was a fellow human being; that alone was relationship enough. "You can call me Virginia, if you want to," she told him. "Last names are silly out here--Heaven knows we can't keep them up in these weeks to come. I've called you Bill ever since the night we crossed the river." Bill looked his gratitude, and she helped him prepare the meat. Some of it he hung just outside the cabin door; one of the great hams suspended in a spruce tree, fifty feet in front of the cabin. The skin was fleshed and hung up behind the stove to dry. "It's going to furnish the web of our snowshoes," he explained. That night their talk took a philosophical trend, and in the candlelight he told her some of his most secret views. She found that the North, the untamed land that had been his home, had colored all his ideas, yet she was amazed at his scientific knowledge of some subjects. Far from the influence of any church, she was surprised to find that he was a religious man. In fact, she found that his religion went deeper than her own. She belonged to one of the Protestant churches of Christianity, attended church regularly, and the church had given her fine ideals and moral precepts; but religion itself was not a reality to her. It was not a deep urge, an inner and profound passion as it was with him. She prayed in church, she had always prayed--half automatically--at bedtime; but actual, entreating prayer to a literal God had been outside her born of thought. In her sheltered life she had never felt the need of a literal God. The spirit of All Being was not close to her, as it was to him.