At first he saw nothing, but what he had seen before--the world of snow, the starry skies.

Yet the sound, which stopped and again went on, came to him as if from the direction in which he looked.

Looking, listening intently, he was just about to turn in for his coat and snow-shoes in order to go forth and seek the owner of the voice, when he perceived something moving between him and the nearest wood--that very birch wood in which, more than a month before, he had sought for the man Cameron who had disappeared from his own coffin.

In an instant the mood of that time flashed back on him as if there had been nothing between.
All the search that had been made for Cameron in the first days of the snow had resulted in nothing but the finding of his coarse winding-sheet in this birch wood.

Then and since, confused rumours had come that he was wandering from village to village, but no one had been brave enough to detain him.