Bill had found his religion in the wilderness, and it was real. He had listened to the voices of the wind and the stir of the waters in the fretful lake; he had caught dim messages, yet profound enough to flood his heart with passion, in the rustling of the leaves, the utter silence of the night, the unearthly beauty of the far ranges, stretching one upon another. His was an austere God, infinitely just and wise, but His great aims were far beyond the power of men's finite minds to grasp. Most of all, his was a God of strength, of mighty passions and moods, but aloof, watchful, secluded. In this night, and the nights that followed, she absorbed--a little at a time--his most harboured ideas of life and nature. He did not speak freely, but she drew him out with sympathetic interest. But for all he knew life in the raw and the gloom of the spruce forest, his outlook had not been darkened. For all his long acquaintance with a stark and remorseless Nature, he remained an optimist. None of his views surprised her as much as this. He knew the snows and the cold, this man; the persecution of the elements and the endless struggle and pain of life, yet he held no rancor. "It's all part of the game," he explained. "It's some sort of a test, a preparation--and there's some sort of a scheme, too big for human beings to see, behind it." He believed in a hereafter. He thought that the very hardship of life made it necessary. Earthly existence could not be an end in itself, he thought: rather the tumult and stress shaped and strengthened the soul for some stress to come. "And some of us conquer and go on," he told her earnestly. "And some of us fall--and stop." "But life isn't so hard," she answered. "I've never known hardship or trial. I know many men and girls that don't know what it means." "So much to their loss. Virginia, those people will go out of life as soft, as unprepared, as when they came in. They will be as helpless as when they left their mother's wombs. They haven't been disciplined. They haven't known pain and work and battle--and the strengthening they entail. They don't live a natural life. Nature meant for all creatures to struggle. Because of man's civilization they are having an artificial existence, and they pay for it in the end. Nature's way is one of hardship."