ch you its ways. I mean this man who you say
is the most wonderful man in the world."

He waited, trembling. It seemed an eternity before Jeanne answered. And
then she said:

"He is my father, M'sieur Philip."

Philip could not speak. Darkness hid him from Jeanne. She did not see
that which leaped into his face, and that for a moment he was on the
point of flinging himself at her feet.

"You spoke of yourself, of Pierre, of your father, and of one other at
Fort o' God," said Philip. "I thought that he--the other--was your
tutor."

"No, it is Pierre's sister," replied Jeanne.

"Your sister! You have a sister?"

He could hear Jeanne catch her breath.

"Listen, M'sieur,'" she said, after a moment. "I must tell you a little
about Pierre, a story of something that happened a long, long time ago.
It was in the middle of a terrible winter, and Pierre was then a boy.
One day he was out hunting and he came upon a trail--the trail of a
woman who had dragged herself through the snow in her moccasined feet.
It was far out upon a barren, where there was no life, and he followed.
He found her, M'sieur, and she was dead. She had died from cold and
starvation. An hour sooner he might have saved her, for, wrapped up
close against her breast, he found a little child--a baby girl, and she
was alive. He brought her to Fort o' God, M'sieur--to a noble man who
lived there almost alone; and there, through all these years, she has
lived and grown up. And no one knows who her mother was, or who her
father was, and so it happens that Pierre, who found her, is her
brother, and the man who has loved her and cared for her is her father."

"And she is the other at Fort o' God--Pierre's sister," said Philip.

Jeanne rose from the rock and moved toward the tent, glimmering
indistinctly in the night. Her voice came back chokingly.

"No, M'sieur. Pierre's real sister is at Fort o' God. I am the one whom
he found out on the barren."

To the night sounds there was added a heart-broken sob, and Jeanne
disappeared in the tent.

XIV

Philip sat where Jeanne had left him. He was powerless to move or to
say a word that might have recalled her. Her own grief, quivering in
that one piteous sob, overwhelmed him. It held him mute and listening,
with the hope that each instant the tent-flap might open and Jeanne
reappear. And yet if she came he had no words to say. Unwittingly he
had probed deep into one of those wounds that never heal, an