cross the table.

"Perhaps you will, Jean, when you know there is no longer anything
between Josephine and me," he said. "To-night she told me everything. I
have seen the baby. Her secret she has given to me freely--and it has
made no difference. I love her. Tomorrow I shall ask her to end all
this make-believe, and my heart tells me that she will. We can be
married secretly. No one will ever know."

His face was filled with the flush of hope. One of his hands caught
Jean's in the old grip of friendship--of confidence. Jean did not
reply. But his face betrayed what he did not speak. Once or twice
before Philip had seen the same look of anguish in his eyes, the
tightening of the lines about the corners of his mouth. Slowly the
half-breed rose from the table and turned a little from Philip. In a
moment Philip was at his side.

"Jean!" he cried softly, "you love Josephine!"

No sign of passion was in Jean's face as he met the other's eyes.

"How do you mean, M'sieur?" he asked quietly. "As a father and a
brother, or as a man?"

"A man," said Philip.

Jean smiled. It was a smile of deep understanding, as if suddenly there
had burst upon him a light which he had not seen before.

"I love her as the flowers love the sunshine, as the wood violets love
the rains," he said, touching Philip's arm. "And that, M'sieur, is not
what you understand as the love of a man. There is one other whom I
love in another way, whose voice is the sweetest music in the world,
whose heart beats with mine, whose soul leads me day and night through
the forests, and who whispers to me of our sweet love in my
dreams--Iowaka, my wife! Come, M'sieur; I will take you to her."

"It is late--too late," voiced Philip wonderingly.

But as he spoke he followed Jean. The half-breed seemed to have risen
out of his world now. There was a wonderful light in his face, a
something that seemed to reach back through centuries that were
gone--and in this moment Philip thought of Marechal, of Prince Rupert,
of le Chevalier Grosselier--of the adventurous and royal blood that had
first come over to the New World to form the Great Company, and he knew
that of such men as these was Jean Jacques Croisset, the forest man. He
understood now the meaning of the soft and faultless speech of this man
who had lived always under the stars and the open skies. He was not of
to-day, but a harkening back to that long-forgotten yesterday; in his
veins ran the blood red and st