Half a dozen times that night David had walked from end to end of the five snowbound coaches that made up the Transcontinental.

He believed that for him it was an act of Providence that had delayed the train.
Otherwise a sleeping car would have been picked up at the next divisional point, and he would not have unburdened himself to Father Roland.

They would not have sat up until that late hour in the smoking compartment, and this strange little man of the forest would not have told him the story of a lonely cabin up on the edge of the Barrens--a story of strange pathos and human tragedy that had, in some mysterious way, unsealed his own lips.

David had kept to himself the shame and heartbreak of his own affliction since the day he had been compelled to tell it, coldly and without visible emotion, to gain his own freedom.

He had meant to keep it to himself always.