“It’s deuced good of you, Miss Jeanne!” he exclaimed.  “I don’t deserve such kindness from you.”

“Oh!” said Jeanne, and that was all.  She bent over the fire, and Philip went to the creek.

He was determined now to maintain a more certain hold upon himself.  As he doused his face in the cold water his resolutions formed themselves.  For the next few days he would forget everything but the one fact that Jeanne was in his care; he would not hurt her again or compel her confidence.

It was after nine o’clock before they were upon the river.  They paddled without a rest until twelve.  After lunch Philip confiscated Jeanne’s paddle and made her sit facing him in the canoe.

The afternoon passed like a dream to Philip, He did not refer again to Fort o’ God or the people there; he did not speak again of Eileen Brokaw, of Lord Fitzhugh, or of Pierre.  He talked of himself and of those things which had once been his life.  He told of his mother and his father, who had died, and of the little sister, whom he had worshiped, but who had gone with the others.  He bared his loneliness to her as he would have told them to the sister, had she lived; and Jeanne’s soft blue eyes were filled with tenderness and sympathy.  And then he talked of Gregson’s world.  Within himself he called it no longer his own.

It was Jeanne who questioned now.  She asked about cities and great people, about books and women.  Her knowledge amazed Philip.  She might have visited the Louvre.  One would have guessed that she had walked in the streets of Paris, Berlin, and London.  She spoke of Johnson, of Dickens, and of Balzac as though they had died but yesterday.  She was like one who had been everywhere and yet saw everything through a veil that bewildered her.  In her simplicity she unfolded herself to Philip, leaf by leaf, petal by petal, like the morning apios that surrenders its mysteries to the sun.  She knew the world which he had come from, its people, its cities, its greatness; and yet her knowledge was like that of the blind.  She knew, but she had never seen; and in her wistfulness to see as he could see there was a sweetness and a pathos which made every fiber in his body sing with a quiet and thrilling joy.  He knew, now, that the man who was at Fort o’ God must, indeed, be the most wonderful man in the world.  For out of a child of the snows, of the forest, of a savage desolation, he had made Jeanne.  And Jeanne was glorious!

The afternoon passed, and they made thirty miles before they camped for the night.  They traveled the next day, and the one that followed.  On the afternoon of the fourth they were approaching Big Thunder Rapids, close to the influx of the Little Churchill, sixty miles from Fort o’ God.