The blood leaped to Jeanne’s face.  Her soft lips tightened.  A sudden movement, and the bearskin slipped from her shoulders, leaving her leaning a little forward, her eyes blazing.  A dozen words had transformed her from the child he had fancied her to a woman quivering with some powerful emotion, her beautiful head proud and erect, her nostrils dilating with the quickness of her breath.

“That was a mistake,” she said.  There was no sign of passion in her voice.  It trembled a little, but that was all.  “It was a mistake, M’sieur Philip.  I thought that I knew her, and—­and I was wrong.  You—­you must not remember that!”

“I am no better than a wild beast,” groaned Philip, hating himself.  “I’m the biggest idiot in the world when it comes to saying the wrong thing, I never miss a chance.  I didn’t mean to say anything—­that would hurt—­”

“You haven’t,” interrupted the girl, quickly, seeing the distress in his face.  “You haven’t said a thing that’s wrong.  Only I don’t want you to remember that picture.  I want you to think of me as—­ as—­I burned the bad man’s neck.”

She was laughing now, though her breast was rising and falling a little excitedly and the deep color was still in her cheeks.

“Will you?” she entreated.

“Until I die,” he exclaimed.

She was fumbling under the luggage, and dragged forth a second paddle.

“I’ve had an easy time with you, M’sieur Philip,” she said, turning so that she was kneeling with her back to him.  “Pierre makes me work.  Always I kneel here, in the bow, and paddle.  I am ashamed of myself.  You have worked all night.”

“And I feel as fresh as though I had slept for a week,” declared Philip, his eyes devouring the slim figure a paddle’s length in front of him.

For an hour they continued up the river, with scarcely a word between them to break the silence.  Their paddles rose and fell with a rhythmic motion; the water rippled like low music under their canoe; the spell of the silent shores, of voiceless beauty, of the wilderness awakening into day appealed to them both and held them quiet.  The sun broke faintly through the drawn mists behind.  Its first rays lighted up Jeanne’s rumpled hair, so that her heavy braid, partly undone and falling upon the luggage behind her, shone in rich and changing colors that fascinated Philip.  He had thought that Jeanne’s hair was very dark, but he saw now that it was filled with the rare life of a Titian head, running from red to gold and dark brown, with changing shadows and flashes of light.  It was beautiful.  And Jeanne, as he looked at her, he thought to be the most beautiful thing on earth.  The movement of her arms, the graceful, sinuous twists of her slender body as she put her strength upon the paddle, the poise of her head, the piquant tilt to her chin whenever she turned so that he caught a half profile of her flushed, eager face all filled his cup of admiration