“You’ve been to China, too,” mused Philip, half to himself.

“I know that it’s filled with yellow girls, and that they squeeze their feet like this,” said Jeanne, unlacing her moccasin.  “My tutor and I have just finished a delightful trip along the Great Wall.  We’d go to Peking, in an automobile, if I wasn’t afraid.”

Philip’s groan was audible.  He went to the canoe, and Jeanne’s red lips curled in a merriment which it was hard for her too suppress.  Philip did not see.  When he had unloaded the canoe and turned, Jeanne was walking slowly back and forth, limping a little.

“It’s all right,” she said, answering the question on his lips.  “I don’t feel any pain at all, but my foot’s asleep.  Won’t you please unstrap the small pack?  I’m going to make my toilet while you are gone with the canoe.”

Half an hour later Philip unshouldered the canoe at the upper end of the rapids.  His own toilet articles were back in the cabin with Gregson, but he took a wash in the river and combed his hair with his fingers.  When he returned, there was a transformation in Jeanne.  Her beautiful hair was done up in shining coils.  She had changed her bedraggled skirt for another of soft, yellow buckskin.  At her throat she wore a fluffy mass of crimson stuff which seemed to reflect a richer rose-flush in her cheeks.  A curious thought came to Philip as he looked at her.  Like a flash the memory of a certain night came to him—­when it had taken Miss Brokaw and her maid two hours to make a toilet for a ball.  And Jeanne, in the heart of a wilderness, had made herself more beautiful than Eileen.  He imagined, as she stood before him, a little embarrassed by the admiration in his eyes, the sensation Jeanne would create in a ballroom at home.  And then he laughed—­laughed joyously at thoughts which he could not reveal to Jeanne, and which she, by some quick intuition, knew that she should not ask him to express.

Twice again Philip made the portage, accompanied the second time by Jeanne, who insisted on carrying a small pack and two paddles.  In spite of his determination and splendid physique, Philip began to feel the effects of the tremendous strain which he had been under for so long.  He counted back and found that he had slept but six hours in the last forty-eight.  There was a warning ache in his shoulders and a gnawing pain in the bones of his forearms.  But he knew that he had not yet made sufficient headway up the Churchill.  It would not be difficult for him to make a camp far enough back in the bush to avoid discovery; but, at the same time, if he and Jeanne were pursued, the stop would give their enemies a chance to get ahead of them.  This danger he wished to escape.

He flattered himself that Jeanne saw no signs of his weakening.  He did not know that Jeanne put more and more effort into her paddle, until her arms and body ached, because she saw the truth.