“And you couldn’t go back now,” he said, a tone of triumph in his voice.  “When the forests once claim you—­they hold.”

“Not alone the forests, Mon Pere.”

“Ah, Mignonne.  No, there is neither man nor beast in the world that would leave her.  Even the dogs are chained out in the deep spruce that they may not tear down her doors in the night to come near her.  The whole world loves my Josephine.  The Indians make the Big Medicine for her in a hundred tepees when they learn she is ill.  They have trimmed five hundred lob-stick trees in her memory.  Mon Dieu, in the Company’s books there are written down more than thirty babes and children grown who bear her name of Josephine!  She is different than her mother.  Miriam has been always like a flower—­a timid wood violet, loving this big world, yet playing no part in it away from my side.  Sometimes Josephine frightens me.  She will travel a hundred miles by sledge to nurse a sick child, and only last winter she buried herself in a shack filled with smallpox and brought six souls out of it alive!  For two weeks she was buried in that hell.  That is Mignonne, whom Indian, breed, and white man call L’Ange.  Miriam they call La Fleurette.  We are two fortunate men, my son!”

A dozen questions burned on Philip’s lips, but he held them back, fearing that some accidental slip of the tongue might betray him.  He was convinced that Josephine’s father knew absolutely nothing of the trouble that was wrecking the happiness of Adare House, and he was equally positive that all, even Miriam herself, were fighting to keep the secret from him.

That Josephine’s motherhood was not the sole cause of the mysterious and tragic undercurrent that he had been made to feel he was more than suspicious.  A few hours would tell him if he was right, for he would ask Josephine to become his wife.  And he already knew what John Adare did not know.

Miriam was not sick with a physical illness.  The doctors whom Adare had not believed were right.  And he wondered, as he sat facing her husband, if it was fear for his life that was breaking her down.  Were they shielding him from some great and ever-menacing peril—­a danger with which, for some inconceivable reason, they dared not acquaint him?

In the short time he had known him, a strange feeling for John Adare had found a place in Philip’s heart.  It was more than friendship, more than the feeling which his supposed relationship might have roused.  This big-hearted, tender, rumbling voiced giant of a man he had grown to love.  And he found himself struggling blindly now to keep from him what the others were trying to conceal, for he knew that John Adare’s heart would crumble down like a pile of dust if he knew the truth.  He was thinking of the baby, and it seemed as if his thoughts flashed like fire to the other.

Adare was laughing softly in his beard.

“You should have seen the kid last night, Philip.  When they woke ’im he stared at me for a time as though I was an ogre, then he grinned, kicked me, and grabbed my whiskers, I’ve just one fault to find.  I wish he was a dozen instead of me.  The little rascal!  I wonder if he is awake?”