With the feeling of one who was not quite sure that he was awake, Philip paused under a street lamp ten minutes after leaving the McCloud apartments, and looked at his watch.  It was a quarter of two o’clock.  A low whistle of surprise fell from his lips.  For three hours he had been with Colonel McCloud and his daughter.  It had seemed like an hour.  He still felt the thrill of the warm, parting pressure of Josephine’s hand; he saw the gratitude in her eyes; he heard her voice, low and tremulous, asking him to come again to-morrow evening.  His brain was in a strange whirl of excitement, and he laughed—­laughed with gladness which he had not felt before in all the days of his life.

He had told a great many things about Peter God that night; of the man’s life in the little cabin, his loneliness, his aloofness, and the mystery of him.  Philip had asked no questions of Josephine and her father, and more than once he had caught that almost tender gratitude in Josephine’s eyes.  And at least twice he had seen the swift, haunting fear—­the first time when he told of Peter God’s coming and goings at Port MacPherson, and again when he mentioned a patrol of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police that had passed Peter God’s cabin while Philip was there, laid up during those weeks of darkness and storm with a fractured leg.

Philip told how tenderly Peter God nursed him, and how their acquaintance grew into brotherhood during the long gray nights when the stars gleamed like pencil-points and the foxes yapped incessantly.  He had seen the dewy shimmer of tears in Josephine’s eyes.  He had noted the tense lines in Colonel McCloud’s face.  But he had asked them no questions, he had made no effort to unmask the secret which they so evidently desired to keep from him.

Now, alone in the cool night, he asked himself a hundred questions, and yet with a feeling that he understood a great deal of what they had kept from him.  Something had whispered to him then—­and whispered to him now—­that Peter God was not Peter God’s right name, and that to Josephine McCloud and her father he was a brother and a son.  This thought, so long as he could think it without a doubt, filled his cup of hope to overflowing.  But the doubt persisted.  It was like a spark that refused to go out.  Who was Peter God?  What was Peter God, the half-wild fox-hunter, to Josephine McCloud?  Yes—­he could be but that one thing!  A brother.  A black sheep.  A wanderer.  A son who had disappeared—­and was now found.  But if he was that, only that, why would they not tell him?  The doubt sputtered up again.

Philip did not go to bed.  He was anxious for the day, and the evening that was to follow.  A woman had unsettled his world.  His mica mountain became an unimportant reality.  Barrow’s greatness no longer loomed up for him.  He walked until he was tired, and it was dawn when he went to his hotel.  He was like a boy living in the anticipation of a great promise—­restless, excited, even feverishly anxious all day.  He made inquiries about Colonel James McCloud at his hotel.  No one knew him, or had even heard of him.  His name was not in the city directory or the telephone directory.  Philip made up his mind that Josephine and her father were practically strangers in the city, and that they had come from Canada—­probably Montreal, for he remembered the stamp on the box of cigars.