Since morning, when he had looked on that wilderness for the first time in his life, new blood had entered into him, and he rejoiced that it was this wonderful world which was to hold for him success and fortune.

Never had he dreamed that the mere joy of living would appeal to him as it did now; that the act of breathing, of seeing, of looking on wonders in which his hands had taken no part in the making, would fill him with the indefinable pleasure which had suddenly become his experience.

He wondered, as he still stood gazing into the infinity of that other world beyond the Saskatchewan, if romance was really quite dead in him.
Always he had laughed at romance.

Work--the grim reality of action, of brain fighting brain, of cleverness pitted against other men's cleverness--had almost brought him to the point of regarding romance in life as a peculiar illusion of fools--and women.

But he was fair in his concessions, and to-night he acknowledged that he had enjoyed the romance of what he had seen and heard.