our make-believe world.  It is the spirit of Fort o’ God that lives with us, and makes us content; the shadow-faces of men and women who once filled these rooms with life and pleasure, and whose memory seems to have passed into our keeping alone.  I know them all; many of their names, all of their faces.  I have a daguerreotype of Camille Poitiers, and she must have been very beautiful.  There are the tiniest slippers in the world in her chest, and ribbons like those which are tied about the pistols.  There is a painting of D’Arcy in your room.  It is the picture next to the one that has its face turned to the wall.”

She rose to her feet, and Philip stood beside her.  There was a mist in her eyes as she held out her hand to him.

“I—­I—­would like to have you—­see that picture,” she whispered.

Philip could not speak.  He held the hand Jeanne had given him as they passed through the long, dimly lighted halls.  At the open door to his room they stopped, and he could feel Jeanne trembling.

“You will tell me—­the truth?” she begged, like a child.  “You will tell me what you think—­of the picture?”

“Yes.”

She went in ahead of him and turned the frame so that the face in the picture smiled down upon them in all of its luring loveliness.  There was something pathetic in the girl’s attitude now.  She stood under the picture, facing Philip, and there was a tense eagerness in her eyes, a light that was almost supplication, a crying out of her soul to him in a breathless moment that seemed hovering between pain and joy.  It was Jeanne, an older Jeanne, that looked from out of the picture, smiling, inviting admiration, bewildering hi her beauty; it was Jeanne, the child, waiting for him in flesh and blood to speak, her eyes big and dark, her breath coming quickly, her hands buried in the deep lace on her bosom.  A low word came to Philip’s lips, and then he laughed softly.  It was a laugh, almost under his breath, which sweeps up now and then from a soul in a joy—­an emotion—­which is unutterable in words.  But to Jeanne it was different.  Her dark eyes grew hurt and wounded, two great tears ran down her paling cheeks, and suddenly she buried her face in her hands and with a sobbing cry turned from him, with her head bowed under the smiling face above.

“And you—­you hate it, too!” she sobbed.  “They all hate it—­ Pierre—­father—­all—­all hate it.  It must—­it must be bad.  They hate her—­every one—­but me.  And—­I love her so!”

Her slender form shook with sobs.  For a moment Philip stood like one struck dumb.  Then he sprang to her and caught her close in his arms.

“Jeanne—­Jeanne—­listen,” he cried.  “To-night I looked at that picture before I went to see your father, and I loved it because it is like you.  Jeanne, my darling, I love you—­I love you—­”

She was panting against his breast.  He covered her face with kisses.  Her sweet lips were not turned from him, and there filled her eyes a sudden light that made him almost sob in his happiness.