He tried to throw off the feeling of oppression that still clung to him.  By the time he reached camp he had partly succeeded.  The fire was burning brightly again, and Jean was busy preparing breakfast.  To his surprise he saw Josephine standing outside of her tent.  She had finished brushing her hair, and was plaiting it in a long braid.  He had wondered how they would meet that morning.  His face flushed warm as he approached her.  The thrill of their kiss was still on his lips, and his heart sent the memory of it burning in his eyes as he came up, Josephine turned to greet him.  She was pale and calm.  There were dark lines under her eyes, and her voice was steady and without emotion as she said “Good morning.”  It was as if he had dreamed the thing that had passed the night before.  There was neither glow of tenderness, of regret, nor of memory in her eyes.  Her smile was wan and forced.  He knew that she was calling upon his chivalry to forget that one moment before the door of her tent.  He bowed, and said simply: 

“I’m afraid you didn’t sleep well, Josephine.  Did I disturb you when I stole out of camp?”

“I heard nothing,” she replied.  “Nothing but the cries of that terrible bird out on the lake.  I’m afraid I didn’t sleep much.”

The atmosphere of the camp that morning weighted Philip’s heart with a heaviness which he could not throw off.  He performed his share of the work with Jean, and tried to talk to him, but Croisset would only reply to his most pointed remarks.  He whistled.  He shouted out a song back in the timber as he cut an armful of dry birch, and he returned to Jean and the girl laughing, the wood piled to his chin and the axe under his arm.  Neither showed that they had heard him.  The meal was eaten in a chilly silence that filled him with deepest foreboding.  Josephine seemed at ease.  She talked with him when he spoke to her, but there seemed now to be a mysterious restraint in every word that she uttered.  She excused herself before Jean and he were through, and went to her tent.  A moment later Philip rose and went down to his canoe.

In the rubber sack was the last of his tobacco.  He was fumbling for it when his heart gave a great jump.  A voice had spoken softly behind him: 

“Philip.”

Slowly, unbelieving, he turned.  It was Josephine.  For the first time she had called him by his name.  And yet the speaking of it seemed to put a distance between them, for her voice was calm and without emotion, as she might have spoken to Jean.

“I lay awake nearly all of the night, thinking,” she said.  “It was a terrible thing that we did, and I am sorry—­sorry—­”

In the quickening of her breath he saw how heroically she was fighting to speak steadily to him.

“You can’t understand,” she resumed, facing him with the steadiness of despair.  “You cannot understand—­until you reach Adare House.  And that is what I dread, the hour when you will know what I am, and how terrible it was for me to do what I did last night.  If you were like most other men, I wouldn’t care so much.  But you have been different.”