trate into the white,
twisting gloom beyond the glass. For many minutes he stood, seeing
nothing. And then he heard a sound, and turned to see Jeanne and her
father standing in the door. Glory was in the face of the master of
Fort o' God. He seemed not to see Philip--he seemed to see nothing but
the picture that was turned against the wall. He strode across the
room, his great shoulders straightened, his shaggy head erect, and with
the pride of one revealing first to human eyes the masterpiece of his
soul and life he turned the picture so that the radiant face of the
wife and mother looked down upon him. And was it fancy that for a
fleeting moment the smile left the beautiful lips, and a light, soft
and luminous, pleading for love and forgiveness, filled the eyes of
Jeanne's mother? Philip trembled. Jeanne came across to him silently,
and crept into his arms. And then, slowly, the master of Fort o' God
turned toward them and stretched out both of his great arms.

"My children!" he said.

XXV

All that night the storm came out of the north and east. Hours after
Jeanne and her father had left him Philip went quietly from his room,
passed down the hall, and opened the outer door. He could hear the gale
whistling over the top of the great rock, and moaning in the spruce and
cedar forest, and he closed the door after him, and buried himself in
the darkness and wind. He bowed his head to the stinging snow, which
came like blasts of steeled shot, and hurried into the shelter of the
Sun Rock, and stood there after that listening to the wildness of the
storm and the strange whistling of the wind cutting itself to pieces
far over his head. Since man had first beheld that rock such storms as
this had come and gone for countless generations. Two hundred years and
more had passed since Grosellier first looked out upon a wondrous world
from its summit. And yet this storm--to-night--whistling and moaning
about him, filling all space with its grief, its triumph, and its
madness, seemed to be for him--and for him alone. His heart answered to
it. His soul trembled to the marvelous meaning of it. To-night this
storm was his own. He was a part of a world which he would never leave.
Here, beside the great Sun Rock of the Crees, he had found home, life,
happiness, his God. Here, henceforth through all time, he would live
with his beloved Jeanne, dreaming no dreams that went beyond the peace
of the mountains and the forests. He lif