“I have a little packing to do,” he said, looking after Jean, who was moving toward the tent.  “Twenty-seven prunes and—­”

“Me,” laughed Josephine.  “Is it not necessary that you make room in your canoe for me?”

Philip’s face flushed with pleasure.

“Of course it is,” he cried.  “Everything has seemed so wonderfully unreal to me that for a moment I forgot that you were my—­my wife.  But how about Jean?  He called me M’sieur Weyman.”

“He is the one other person in the world who knows what you and I know,” she explained.  “That, too, was necessary.  Will you go and arrange your canoe now?  Jean will bring down my things and exchange them for some of your dunnage.”  She left him to run into the tent, reappearing quickly with a thick rabbit-skin blanket and two canoe pillows.

“These make my nest—­when I’m not working,” she said, thrusting them into Philip’s arms.  “I have a paddle, too.  Jean says that I am as good as an Indian woman with it.”

“Better, M’sieur,” exclaimed Jean, who had come out of the tent.  “It makes you work harder to see her.  She is—­what you call it—­ gwan-auch-ewin—­so splendid!  Out of the Cree you cannot speak it.”

A tender glow filled Josephine’s eyes as Jean began pulling up the pegs of the tent.

“A little later I will tell you about Jean,” she whispered.  “But now, go to your canoe.  We will follow you in a few minutes.”

He left her, knowing that she had other things to say to Jean which she did not wish him to hear.  As he turned toward the coulee he noticed that she still held the opened letter in her hand.

There was not much for him to do when he reached his canoe.  He threw out his sleeping bag and tent, and arranged Josephine’s robe and pillows so that she would sit facing him.  The knowledge that she was to be with him, that they were joined in a pact which would make her his constant companion, filled him with joyous visions and anticipations.  He did not stop to ask himself how long this mysterious association might last, how soon it might come to the tragic end to which she had foredoomed it.  With the spirit of the adventurer who had more than once faced death with a smile, he did not believe in burning bridges ahead of him.  He loved Josephine.  To him this love had come as it had come to Tristan and Isolde, to Paola and Francesca—­sudden and irresistible, but, unlike theirs, as pure as the air of the world which he breathed.  That he knew nothing of her, that she had not even revealed her full name to him, did not affect the depth or sincerity of his emotion.  Nor had her frank avowal that he could expect no reward destroyed his hope.  The one big thought that ran through his brain now, as he arranged the canoe, was that there was room for hope, and that she had been free to accept the words he had spoken to her without dishonour to herself.  If she belonged to some other man she would not have asked him to play the part of a husband.  Her freedom and his right to fight for her was the one consuming fact of significance to him just now.  Beside that all others were trivial and unimportant, and every drop of blood in his veins was stirred by a strange exultation.