it passed into the hands of a man by the name of D’Arcy, and it is said that at one time it housed twenty gentlemen and as many ladies of France for one whole season.  Its history is obscure, and mostly lost.  But for a long time after D’Arcy came it was a place of adventure, of pleasure, and of mystery, very little of which remains to-day.  Those are his pistols above the fire.  He was killed by one of them out there beside the big rock, in a quarrel with one of his guests over a woman.  We think—­here—­from letters that we have found, that her name was Camille.  There is a chest in my room filled with linen that bears her name.  This dress came from that chest.  I have to be careful of them, as they tear very easily.  After D’Arcy the place was almost forgotten and remained so until nearly forty years ago when my father came into possession of it.  That, M’sieur, is the very simple story of Fort o’ God.  Its old name is forgotten.  It lives only with us.  Others know it as D’Arcambal House.”

“Yes, I have heard of that,” said Philip.

He waited for Jeanne, and saw that her fingers were nervously twisting a bit of ribbon in her lap.

“Of course, that is uninteresting,” she continued.  “You can almost guess the rest.  We have lived here—­alone.  Not one of us has ever felt the desire to leave this little world of ours.  It is curious —­you may scarcely believe what I say—­but it is true that we look out upon your big world and laugh at it and dislike it.  I guess—­ that I have been taught to hate it—­since I can remember.”

There was a little tremble in Jeanne’s voice, an instant’s quivering of her chin.  Philip looked from her face into the fire, and stared hard, choking back words which were ready to burst from his lips.  In place of them he said, with a touch of bitterness in his voice: 

“And I have grown to hate my world, Jeanne.  It has compelled me to hate it.  That is why I spoke to you that night on the cliff at Churchill.”

“I have sometimes thought that I have been very wrong,” said the girl.  “I have never seen this other world.  I know nothing of it, except as I have been taught.  I have no right to hate it, and yet I do.  I have never wanted to see it.  I have never cared to know the people who lived in it.  I wish that I could understand, but I cannot; except that father has made for us, for Pierre and Otille and me, this little world at Fort o’ God, and has taught us to fear the other.  I know that there is no other man in the whole world like my father, and that what he has done must be best.  It is his pride that we bring your world to our doors, but that we never go to it; he says that we know more about that world than the people who live there, which of course cannot be so.  And so we have grown up amid the old memories, the pictures, and the dead romances of Fort o’ God.  We have taken pleasure in living as we do—­in making for ourselves our own little social codes, our childish aristocracy,