ould not have come to him. He feared that his voice
might betray him as he laid a hand on Adare's arm.

"If you will excuse me I will join her," he said. "I know it doesn't
seem just right to tear off in this way, but--you see--"

Adare interrupted him with one of his booming laughs.

"Go, my lad. I understand. If it was Miriam instead of Mignonne running
away like that, John Adare wouldn't be waiting this long."

Philip turned and left the room, every pulse in his body throbbing with
an excitement roused by the knowledge that the hour had come when
Josephine would give herself to him forever, or doom him to that
hopelessness for which Jean Croisset had told him to prepare himself.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In his eagerness to join Josephine Philip had reached the outer door
before it occurred to him that he was without hat or coat and had on
only a pair of indoor moccasin slippers. He would still have gone on,
regardless of this utter incongruity of dress, had he not known that
John Adare would see him through the window. He partly opened the hall
door and looked out. Josephine was halfway to the forest. He turned
swiftly back to his room, threw on a coat, put his moccasins on over
the soft caribou skin slippers, caught up his cap, and hurried back to
the door. Josephine had disappeared into the edge of the forest. He
held himself to a walk until he reached the cover of the spruce, but no
sooner was he beyond Adare's vision than he began to run. Three or four
hundred yards in the forest he overtook Josephine.

He had come up silently in the soft snow, and she turned, a little
startled, when he called her name.

"You, Philip!" she exclaimed, the colour deepening quickly in her
cheeks. "I thought you were with father in the big room."

She had never looked lovelier to him. From the top of her hooded head
to the hem of her short skirt she was dressed in a soft and richly
glowing red. Her eyes shone gloriously this morning, and about her
mouth there was a tenderness and a sweetness which had not been there
the night before. The lines that told of her strain and grief were
gone. She seemed like a different Josephine now, confessing in this
first thrilling moment of their meeting that she, too, had been living
in the memory of what had passed between them a few hours before. And
yet in the gentle welcome of her smile there was a mingling of sadness
and of pathos that tempered Philip's joy as he came to her and took