tears, her eyes
shimmering like velvety pools through their mist. She did not speak.
She was woman now--all woman. Her strength, the bearing which had made
him think of her as a queen, the fighting tension which she had been
under, were gone. Until she looked at him through her tears her
presence had been like that of some wonderful and unreal creature who
held the control to his every act in the cup of her hands. He thought
no longer of himself now. He knew that to him she had relinquished the
mysterious fight under which she had been struggling. In her eyes he
read her surrender. From this hour the fight was his. She told him,
without speaking. And the glory of it all thrilled him with a sacred
happiness so that he wanted to drop his paddle, draw her close into his
arms, and tell her that there was no power in the world that could harm
her now. But instead of this he laughed low and joyously full into her
eyes, and her lips smiled gently back at him. And so they understood
without words.

Behind them, Jean had been coming up swiftly, and now they heard him
break for an instant into the chorus of one of the wild half-breed
songs, and Philip listened to the words of the chant which is as old in
the Northland as the ancient brass cannon and the crumbling fortress
rocks at York Factory:

"O, ze beeg black bear, he go to court,
He go to court a mate;
He court to ze Sout',
He court to ze Nort',
He court to ze shores of ze Indian Lake."

And then, in the moment's silence that followed, Philip threw back his
head, and in a voice almost as wild and untrained as Jean Croisset's,
he shouted back:

"Oh! the fur fleets sing on Temiskaming,
As the ashen paddles bend,
And the crews carouse at Rupert's House,
At the sullen winter's end.
But my days are done where the lean wolves run,
And I ripple no more the path
Where the gray geese race 'cross the red moon's face
From the white wind's Arctic wrath."

The suspense was broken. The two men's voices, rising in their crude
strength, sending forth into the still wilderness both triumph and
defiance, brought the quick flush of living back into Josephine's face.
She guessed why Jean had started his chant--to give her courage. She
KNEW why Philip had responded. And now Jean swept up beside them, a
smile on his thin, dark face.

"The Good Virgin preserve us, M'sieur, but our voices are like those of
two beasts," he crie