But I float in dreams on Northland streams
That never again I'll see,
As I lie on the marge of the old Portage,
With grief for company."

"A canoe!" breathed the girl, looking back over the sunlit lake.

"Yes, a canoe, cast aside, forgotten, as sometimes men and women are
forgotten when down and out."

"Men and women who live in dreams," she added. "And with such dreams
there must always be grief."

There was a moment of the old pain in her face, a little catch in her
breath, and then she turned and looked at the forest ridge to which he
had called her attention.

"We go deep into that forest," she said. "We enter a creek just beyond
where Jean is waiting for us, and Adare House is a hundred miles to the
south and east." She faced him with a quick smile. "My name is Adare,"
she explained, "Josephine Adare."

"Is--or was?" he asked.

"Is," she said; then, seeing the correcting challenge in his eyes she
added quickly: "But only to you. To all others I am Madame Paul
Darcambal."

"Paul?"

"Pardon me, I mean Philip."

They were close to shore, and fearing that Jean might become suspicious
of his tardiness, Philip bent to his paddle and was soon in the
half-breed's wake. Where he had thought there was only the thick forest
he saw a narrow opening toward which Jean was speeding in his canoe.
Five minutes later they passed under a thick mass of overhanging spruce
boughs into a narrow stream so still and black in the deep shadows of
the forest that it looked like oil. There was something a little
awesome in the suddenness and completeness with which they were
swallowed up. Over their heads the spruce and cedar tops met and shut
out the sunlight. On both sides of them the forest was thick and black.
The trail of the stream itself was like a tunnel, silent, dark,
mysterious. The paddles dipped noiselessly, and the two canoes
travelled side by side.

"There are few who know of this break into the forest," said Jean in a
low voice. "Listen, M'sieur!"

From out of the gloom ahead of them there came a faint, oily splashing.

"Otter," whispered Jean. "The stream is like this for many miles, and
it is full of life that you can never see because of the darkness."

Something in the stillness and the gloom held them silent. The canoes
slipped along like shadows, and sometimes they bent their heads to
escape the low-hanging boughs. Josephine's face shone whitely in the
dusk. She was alert and listening