Josephine drew a deep breath as the sunlight flooded her face and hair.

“I have my own name for that place,” she said.  “I call it the Valley of Silent Things.  It is a great swamp, and they say that the moss grows in it so deep that caribou and deer walk over it without breaking through.”

The stream was swelling out into a narrow, finger-like lake that stretched for a mile or more ahead of them, and she turned to nod her head at the spruce and cedar shores with their colourings of red and gold, where birch, and poplar, and ash splashed vividly against the darker background.

“From now on it is all like that.” she said.  “Lake after lake, most of them as narrow as this, clear to the doors of Adare House.  It is a wonderful lake country, and one may easily lose one’s self—­hundreds of lakes, I guess, running through the forests like Venetian canals.”

“I would not be surprised if you told me you had been in Venice,” he replied.  “To-day is your birthday—­your twentieth.  Have you lived all those years here?”

He repressed his desire to question her, because he knew that she understood that to be a part of his promise to her.  In what he now asked her he could not believe that he was treading upon prohibited ground, and in the face of their apparent innocence he was dismayed at the effect his words had upon her.  It seemed to him that her eyes flinched when he spoke, as if he had struck at her.  There passed over her face the look which he had come to dread:  a swift, tense betrayal of the grief which he knew was eating at her soul, and which she was fighting so courageously to hide from him.  It had come and gone in a flash, but the pain of it was left with him.  She smiled at him a bit tremulously.

“I understand why you ask that,” she said, “and it is no more than fair that I should tell you.  Of course you are wondering a great deal about me.  You have just asked yourself how I could ever hear of such a place as Venice away up here among the Indians.  Why, do you know”—­she leaned forward, as if to whisper a secret, her blue eyes shilling with a sudden laughter—­“I’ve even read the ‘Lives’ of Plutarch, and I’m waiting patiently for the English to bang a few of those terrible Lucretia Borgias who call themselves militant suffragettes!”

“I—­I—­beg your pardon,” he stammered helplessly.

She no longer betrayed the hurt of his question, and so sweet was the laughter of her eyes and lips that he laughed back at her, in spite of his embarrassment.  Then, all at once, she became serious.

“I am terribly unfair to you,” she apologized gently; and then, looking across the water, she added:  “Yes, I’ve lived almost all of those twenty years up here—­among the forests.  They sent me to the Mission school at Fort Churchill, over on Hudson’s Bay, for three years; and after that, until I was seventeen, I had a little white-haired English governess at Adare House.  If she had lived—­ " Her hands clenched the sides of the canoe, and she looked straight away from Philip.  She seemed to force the words that came from her lips then:  “When I was eighteen I went to Montreal—­and lived there a year, That is all—­that one year—­away from—­my forests—­”