He half rose, as if about to investigate, then reseated himself.

“Guess I’d better not take a chance of waking him,” he reflected.  “If Jean should catch me rousing Josephine or the baby he’d throttle me.”

“Jean is—­a sort of guardian,” ventured Philip.

“More than that.  Sometimes I think he is a spirit,” said Adare impressively.  “I have known him for twenty years.  Since the day Josephine was born he has been her watch-dog.  He came in the heart of a great storm, years and years ago, nearly dead from cold and hunger.  He never went away, and he has talked but little about himself.  See—­”

Adare went to a shelf and returned with a bundle of manuscript.

“Jean gave me the idea for this,” he went on.

There are two hundred and eighty pages here.  I call it ’The Aristocracy of the North.’  It is true—­and it is wonderful!

“You have seen a spring or New Year’s gathering of the forest people at a Company’s post—­the crowd of Indians, half-breeds, and whites who follow the trap-lines?  And would you guess that in that average foregathering of the wilderness people there is better blood than you could find in a crowded ballroom of New York’s millionaires?  It is true.  I have given fish to hungry half-breeds in whose veins flows the blood of royalty.  I have eaten with Indian women whose lineage reaches back to names that were mighty before the first Astors and the first Vanderbilts were born.  The descendant of a king has hunted me caribou meat at two cents a pound.  In a smoke-blackened tepee, over beyond the Gray Loon waterway, there lives a girl with hair and eyes as black as a raven’s wing who could go to Paris to-morrow and say:  ’I am the descendant of a queen,’ and prove it.  And so it is all over the Northland.

“I have hunted down many curious facts, and I have them here in my manuscript.  The world cannot sneer at me, for records have been kept almost since the day away back in the seventeenth century when Prince Rupert landed with his first shipload of gentlemen adventurers.  They intermarried with our splendid Crees—­those first wanderers from the best families of Europe.  They formed the English-Cree half-breed.  Prince Rupert himself had five children that can be traced to him.  Le Chevalier Grosselier had nine.  And so it went on for a hundred years, the best blood in England giving birth to a new race among the Crees, and the best of France sowing new generations among the Chippewyans on their way up from Quebec.

“And for another hundred years and more the English-Cree half-breed and the French-Chippewyan half-breed have been meeting and intermarrying, forming the ‘blood,’ until in all this Northland scarce a man or a woman cannot call back to names that have long become dust in history.

“From the blood of some mighty king of France—­of some splendid queen—­has come Jean Croisset.  I have always felt that, and yet I can trace him no farther than a hundred years back, to the quarter-strain wife of the white factor at Monsoon.  Jean has lost interest in himself now—­since his wife died three years ago.  Has Josephine told you of her?”