talked of himself and of
those things which had once been his life. He told of his mother and
his father, who had died, and of the little sister, whom he had
worshiped, but who had gone with the others. He bared his loneliness to
her as he would have told them to the sister, had she lived; and
Jeanne's soft blue eyes were filled with tenderness and sympathy. And
then he talked of Gregson's world. Within himself he called it no
longer his own.

It was Jeanne who questioned now. She asked about cities and great
people, about books and WOMEN. Her knowledge amazed Philip. She might
have visited the Louvre. One would have guessed that she had walked in
the streets of Paris, Berlin, and London. She spoke of Johnson, of
Dickens, and of Balzac as though they had died but yesterday. She was
like one who had been everywhere and yet saw everything through a veil
that bewildered her. In her simplicity she unfolded herself to Philip,
leaf by leaf, petal by petal, like the morning apios that surrenders
its mysteries to the sun. She knew the world which he had come from,
its people, its cities, its greatness; and yet her knowledge was like
that of the blind. She knew, but she had never seen; and in her
wistfulness to see as HE could see there was a sweetness and a pathos
which made every fiber in his body sing with a quiet and thrilling joy.
He knew, now, that the man who was at Fort o' God must, indeed, be the
most wonderful man in the world. For out of a child of the snows, of
the forest, of a savage desolation, he had made Jeanne. And Jeanne was
glorious!

The afternoon passed, and they made thirty miles before they camped for
the night. They traveled the next day, and the one that followed. On
the afternoon of the fourth they were approaching Big Thunder Rapids,
close to the influx of the Little Churchill, sixty miles from Fort o'
God.

These days, too, passed for Philip with joyous swiftness; swiftly
because they were too short for him. His life, now, was Jeanne. Each
day she became a more vital part of him. She crept into his soul until
there was no longer left room for any other thought than of her. And
yet his happiness was tampered by a thing which, if not grief,
depressed and saddened him at times. Two days more and they would be at
Fort o' God, and there Jeanne would be no longer his own, as she was
now. Even the wilderness has its conventionality, and at Fort o' God
their comradeship would end. A day of rest, two at t