Each step that he took, with his head and heart in a swirl of intoxicating madness, was an effort behind which he was putting a sheer weight of physical will.

He wanted to go back.

The urge was upon him to surrender utterly to the weakness of forgetting that Mary Standish was a wife.

He had almost fallen a victim to his selfishness and passion in the moment when she stood at Nawadlook's door, telling him that she loved him.

An iron hand had drawn him out into the day, and it was the same iron hand that kept his face to the mountains now, while in his brain her voice repeated the words that had set his world on fire.
He knew what had happened this morning was not the merely important and essential incident of most human lives; it had been a cataclysmic thing with him.