, yet playing no part in it away from my side. Sometimes
Josephine frightens me. She will travel a hundred miles by sledge to
nurse a sick child, and only last winter she buried herself in a shack
filled with smallpox and brought six souls out of it alive! For two
weeks she was buried in that hell. That is Mignonne, whom Indian,
breed, and white man call L'Ange. Miriam they call La Fleurette. We are
two fortunate men, my son!"

A dozen questions burned on Philip's lips, but he held them back,
fearing that some accidental slip of the tongue might betray him. He
was convinced that Josephine's father knew absolutely nothing of the
trouble that was wrecking the happiness of Adare House, and he was
equally positive that all, even Miriam herself, were fighting to keep
the secret from him.

That Josephine's motherhood was not the sole cause of the mysterious
and tragic undercurrent that he had been made to feel he was more than
suspicious. A few hours would tell him if he was right, for he would
ask Josephine to become his wife. And he already knew what John Adare
did not know.

Miriam was not sick with a physical illness. The doctors whom Adare had
not believed were right. And he wondered, as he sat facing her husband,
if it was fear for his life that was breaking her down. Were they
shielding him from some great and ever-menacing peril--a danger with
which, for some inconceivable reason, they dared not acquaint him?

In the short time he had known him, a strange feeling for John Adare
had found a place in Philip's heart. It was more than friendship, more
than the feeling which his supposed relationship might have roused.
This big-hearted, tender, rumbling voiced giant of a man he had grown
to love. And he found himself struggling blindly now to keep from him
what the others were trying to conceal, for he knew that John Adare's
heart would crumble down like a pile of dust if he knew the truth. He
was thinking of the baby, and it seemed as if his thoughts flashed like
fire to the other.

Adare was laughing softly in his beard.

"You should have seen the kid last night, Philip. When they woke 'im he
stared at me for a time as though I was an ogre, then he grinned,
kicked me, and grabbed my whiskers, I've just one fault to find. I wish
he was a dozen instead of me. The little rascal! I wonder if he is
awake?"

He half rose, as if about to investigate, then reseated himself.

"Guess I'd better not take a chance of wakin