Even the master of Fort o’ God, stern and forbidding as Philip began to imagine him, might have laughed at the look which came into his face.  Grosellier, the cavalier, had he appeared, Philip would have accepted with the same confidence that he had accepted Jeanne and Pierre.  But—­a furnace!  He thrust his hands deep in his pockets, a trick which was always the last convincing evidence of his perplexity, and walked slowly around the room.  There were two books on the table.  One, bound in faded red vellum, was a Greek Anthology, the other Drummond’s Ascent of Man.  There were other books on a quaintly carved shelf, under the picture which had been turned to the wall.  He ran over the titles.  There were a number of French novels, Ely’s Socialism, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, St. Pierre’s Paul and Virginia, and a dozen other volumes; there were Balzac and Hugo, and Dante’s Divine Comedy.  Amid this array, like a black sheep lost among the angels, was a finger-worn and faded little volume bearing the name Camille.  Something about this one book, so strangely out of place in its present company, aroused Philip’s curiosity.  It bore the name, too, which he had found worked in the corner of Jeanne’s handkerchief.  In a way, the presence of this book gave him a sort of shock, and he took it in his hands, and opened the cover.  Under his fingers were pages yellow and frayed with age, and in an ancient type, once black, the title, The Meaning of God.  In a large masculine hand some one had written under this title the accompanying words; “A black skin often contains a white soul; a woman’s beauty, hell.”

Philip replaced the book with a feeling of awe.  Something in those words, brutal in their truth—­something in the strange whim that had placed a pearl of purity within the faded and worn mask of the condemned, seemed to speak to him of a tragedy that might be a key to the mystery of Fort o’ God.  From the books he looked up at the picture which had been turned to the wall.  The temptation to see what was hidden overcame him, and he turned the frame over.  Then he stepped back with a low cry of pleasure.

From out of the proscribed canvas there smiled down upon him a face of bewildering beauty.  It was the face of a young woman, a stranger among its companions, because it was of the present.  Philip stepped to one side, so that the light from the lamp shone from behind him, and he wondered if the picture had been condemned to hang with its face to the wall because it typified the existent rather than the past.  He looked more closely, and drew back step by step, until he was in the proper focus to bring out every expression in the lovely face.  In the picture he saw each moment a greater resemblance to Jeanne.  The eyes, the hair, the sweetness of the mouth, the smile, brought to him a vision of Jeanne herself.  The woman in the picture was older than Jeanne, and his first thought was that it must be a sister, or her mother.  It came to him in the next breath that this would be impossible, for Jeanne had been found by Pierre in the deep snows, on her dead mother’s breast.  And this was a painting of life, of youth, of beauty, and not of death and starvation.