One of them was short and to the point.

It was an official note from headquarters ordering him to join a certain Buck Nome at Lac Bain, a hundred miles farther north.
It was the second letter which Steele took in his hands for the twentieth time since it had come to him here, three hundred miles into the wilderness.

There were half-a-dozen pages of it, written in a woman's hand, and from it there rose to his nostrils the faint, sweet perfume of hyacinth.

It was this odor that troubled him--that had troubled him since yesterday, and that made him restless and almost homesick to-night.

It took him back to things--to the days of not so very long ago when he had been a part of the life from which the letter came, and when the world had seemed to hold for him all that one could wish.