to overflowing.  And he found himself wondering, suddenly, how this girl could be a sister to Pierre Couchee.  He saw in her no sign of French or half-breed blood.  Her hair was fine and soft, and waved about her ears and where it fell loose upon the back.  The color in her cheeks was as delicate as the tints of the bakneesh flower.  She had rolled up her broad cuffs to give her greater freedom in paddling, and her arms shone white and firm, glistening with the wet drip of the paddle.  He was marveling at her relationship to Pierre when she looked back at him, her face aglow with exercise and the spice of the morning, and he saw the sunlight as blue as the sky above him in her eyes.  If he had not known, he would have sworn that there was not a drop of Pierre’s blood in her veins.

“We are coming to the first rapids, M’sieur Philip,” she announced.  “It is just beyond that ugly mountain of rock ahead of us, and we will have a quarter-mile portage.  It is filled with great stones and so swift that Pierre and I nearly wrecked ourselves coming down.”

It was the most that had been said since the beginning of that wonderful hour that had come before the first gleam of sunrise, and Philip, laying his paddle athwart the canoe, stretched himself and yawned, as though he had just awakened.

“Poor boy,” said Jeanne; and it struck him that her words were strangely like those which Eileen might have spoken had she been there, only an artless comradeship replaced what would have been Miss Brokaw’s tone of intimacy.  She added, with genuine sympathy in her face and voice:  “You must be exhausted, M’sieur Philip.  If you were Pierre I should insist upon going ashore for a number of hours.  Pierre obeys me when we are together.  He calls me his captain.  Won’t you let me command you?”

“If you will let me call you—­my captain,” replied Philip.  “Only there is one thing—­one reservation.  We must go on.  Command me in everything else, but we must go on—­for a time.  To-night I will sleep.  I will sleep like the dead.  So, My Captain,” he laughed, “may I have your permission to work to-day?”

Jeanne was turning the bow shoreward.  Her back was turned to him again.

“You have no pity on me,” she pouted.  “Pierre would be good to me, and we would fish all day in that pretty pool over there.  I’ll bet it’s full of trout.”

Her words, her manner of speaking them, was a new revelation to Philip.  She was delightful.  He laughed, and his voice rang out in the clear morning like a school-boy’s.  Jeanne pretended that she saw nothing to laugh at, and no sooner had the canoe touched shore than she sprang lightly out, not waiting for his assistance.  With a laughing cry, she stumbled and fell.  Philip was at her side in an instant.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he objected.  “I am your doctor, and I insist that your foot is not well.”

“But it is!” cried Jeanne, and he saw that there was laughter instead of pain in her eyes.  “It’s the bandage.  My right foot feels like that of a Chinese debutante.  Ugh!  I’m going to undo it.”