“And this other man you speak of, Radisson?” she asked.

“He died two hundred miles back,” replied Philip quietly.  “But that is unpleasant to speak of.  Look ahead.  Isn’t that ridge of the forest glorious in the sunlight?”

She did not take her eyes from his face.

“Do you know, I think there is something wonderful about you,” she said, so gently and frankly that the blood rushed to his cheeks.  “Some day I want to learn those words that helped to keep you alive up there.  I want to know all of the story, because I think I can understand.  There was more to it—­something after the foxes yelped back at you?”

“This,” he said, and ahead of them Jean Croisset rested on his paddle to listen to Philip’s voice: 

    “My seams gape wide, and I’m tossed aside
      To rot on a lonely shore,
    While the leaves and mould like a shroud enfold,
      For the last of my trails are o’er;
    But I float in dreams on Northland streams
      That never again I’ll see,
    As I lie on the marge of the old Portage,
      With grief for company.”

“A canoe!” breathed the girl, looking back over the sunlit lake.

“Yes, a canoe, cast aside, forgotten, as sometimes men and women are forgotten when down and out.”

“Men and women who live in dreams,” she added.  “And with such dreams there must always be grief.”

There was a moment of the old pain in her face, a little catch in her breath, and then she turned and looked at the forest ridge to which he had called her attention.

“We go deep into that forest,” she said.  “We enter a creek just beyond where Jean is waiting for us, and Adare House is a hundred miles to the south and east.”  She faced him with a quick smile.  “My name is Adare,” she explained, “Josephine Adare.”

“Is—­or was?” he asked.

“Is,” she said; then, seeing the correcting challenge in his eyes she added quickly:  “But only to you.  To all others I am Madame Paul Darcambal.”

“Paul?”

“Pardon me, I mean Philip.”

They were close to shore, and fearing that Jean might become suspicious of his tardiness, Philip bent to his paddle and was soon in the half-breed’s wake.  Where he had thought there was only the thick forest he saw a narrow opening toward which Jean was speeding in his canoe.  Five minutes later they passed under a thick mass of overhanging spruce boughs into a narrow stream so still and black in the deep shadows of the forest that it looked like oil.  There was something a little awesome in the suddenness and completeness with which they were swallowed up.  Over their heads the spruce and cedar tops met and shut out the sunlight.  On both sides of them the forest was thick and black.  The trail of the stream itself was like a tunnel, silent, dark, mysterious.  The paddles dipped noiselessly, and the two canoes travelled side by side.