She was struggling to keep back her emotion, fighting to hold it within her own breast.

“You must go back,” she repeated, staring into his set face.  “If you don’t, you will be hurt terribly, terribly!”

And then, suddenly, she slipped lower among the cushions he had placed for her, and buried her face in one of them with a moaning grief that cut to his soul.  She was sobbing now, like a child.  In this moment Philip forgot all restraint.  He leaned forward and put a hand on her shining head, and bent his face close down to hers.  His free hand touched one of her hands, and he held it tightly.

“Listen, my Josephine,” he whispered.  “I am not going to turn back, I am going on with you.  That is our pact.  At the end I know what to expect.  You have told me; and I, too, believe.  But whatever happens, in spite of all that may happen, I will still have received more than all else in the world could give me.  For I will have known you, and you will be my salvation.  I am going on.”

For an instant he felt the fluttering pressure of her fingers on his.  It was an answer a thousand times more precious to him than words, and he knew that he had won.  Still lower he bent his head, until for an instant his lips touched the soft, living warmth of her hair.  And then he leaned back, freeing her hand, and into his face had leaped soul and life and fighting strength; and under his breath he gave new thanks to God, and to the sun, and the blue sky above, while from behind them came skimming over the water the slim birchbark canoe of Jean Jacques Croisset.

CHAPTER SIX

At the touch of Weyman’s lips to her hair Josephine lay very still, and Philip wondered if she had felt that swift, stolen caress.  Almost he hoped that she had.  The silken tress where for an instant his lips had rested seemed to him now like some precious communion cup in whose sacredness he had pledged himself.  Yet had he believed that she was conscious of his act he would have begged her forgiveness.  He waited, breathing softly, putting greater sweep into his paddle to keep Jean well behind them.

Slowly the tremulous unrest of Josephine’s shoulders ceased.  She raised her head and looked at him, her lovely face damp with tears, her eyes shimmering like velvety pools through their mist.  She did not speak.  She was woman now—­all woman.  Her strength, the bearing which had made him think of her as a queen, the fighting tension which she had been under, were gone.  Until she looked at him through her tears her presence had been like that of some wonderful and unreal creature who held the control to his every act in the cup of her hands.  He thought no longer of himself now.  He knew that to him she had relinquished the mysterious fight under which she had been struggling.  In her eyes he read her surrender.  From this hour the fight was his.  She told him, without speaking.  And the glory of it all thrilled him with a sacred happiness so that he wanted to drop his paddle, draw her close into his arms, and tell her that there was no power in the world that could harm her now.  But instead of this he laughed low and joyously full into her eyes, and her lips smiled gently back at him.  And so they understood without words.