rrassment. Then, all at once, she became serious.

"I am terribly unfair to you," she apologized gently; and then, looking
across the water, she added: "Yes, I've lived almost all of those
twenty years up here--among the forests. They sent me to the Mission
school at Fort Churchill, over on Hudson's Bay, for three years; and
after that, until I was seventeen, I had a little white-haired English
governess at Adare House. If she had lived--" Her hands clenched the
sides of the canoe, and she looked straight away from Philip. She
seemed to force the words that came from her lips then: "When I was
eighteen I went to Montreal--and lived there a year, That is all--that
one year--away from--my forests--"

He almost failed to hear the last words, and he made no effort to
reply. He kept his canoe nearer to Jean's, so that frequently they were
running side by side. In the quick fall of the early northern night the
sun was becoming more and more of a red haze in the sky as it sank
farther toward the western forests. Josephine had changed her position,
so that she now sat facing the bow of the canoe. She leaned a little
forward, her elbows resting in her lap, her chin tilted in the cup of
her hands, looking steadily ahead, and for a long time no sound but the
steady dip, dip, dip of the two paddles broke the stillness of their
progress. Scarcely once did Philip take his eyes from her. Every turn,
every passing of shadow and light, each breath of wind that set
stirring the shimmering tresses of her hair, made her more beautiful to
him. From red gold to the rich and lustrous brown of the ripened wintel
berries he marked the marvellous changing of her hair with the setting
of the sun. A quick chill was growing in the air now and after a little
he crept forward and slipped a light blanket about the slender
shoulders. Even then Josephine did not speak, but looked up at him, and
smiled her thanks. In his eyes, his touch, even his subdued breath,
were the whispers of his adoration.

Movement roused Jean from his Indian-like silence. As Philip moved
back, he called:

"It is four o'clock, M'sieur. We will have darkness in an hour. There
is a place to camp and tepee poles ready cut on the point ahead of us."

Fifteen minutes later Philip ran his canoe ashore close to Jean
Croisset's on a beach of white sand. He could not help seeing that,
from the moment she had answered his question out on the lake, a change
had come over Josephine. Fo