ssued from behind
the curtained bed. Philip himself, in that environment, was the
stranger. It was the current of warm air which brought him back from
the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Under his feet was a furnace!

Even the master of Fort o' God, stern and forbidding as Philip began to
imagine him, might have laughed at the look which came into his face.
Grosellier, the cavalier, had he appeared, Philip would have accepted
with the same confidence that he had accepted Jeanne and Pierre. But--a
furnace! He thrust his hands deep in his pockets, a trick which was
always the last convincing evidence of his perplexity, and walked
slowly around the room. There were two books on the table. One, bound
in faded red vellum, was a Greek Anthology, the other Drummond's Ascent
of Man. There were other books on a quaintly carved shelf, under the
picture which had been turned to the wall. He ran over the titles.
There were a number of French novels, Ely's Socialism, Sir Thomas
More's Utopia, St. Pierre's Paul and Virginia, and a dozen other
volumes; there were Balzac and Hugo, and Dante's Divine Comedy. Amid
this array, like a black sheep lost among the angels, was a finger-worn
and faded little volume bearing the name Camille. Something about this
one book, so strangely out of place in its present company, aroused
Philip's curiosity. It bore the name, too, which he had found worked in
the corner of Jeanne's handkerchief. In a way, the presence of this
book gave him a sort of shock, and he took it in his hands, and opened
the cover. Under his fingers were pages yellow and frayed with age, and
in an ancient type, once black, the title, The Meaning of God. In a
large masculine hand some one had written under this title the
accompanying words; "A black skin often contains a white soul; a
woman's beauty, hell."

Philip replaced the book with a feeling of awe. Something in those
words, brutal in their truth--something in the strange whim that had
placed a pearl of purity within the faded and worn mask of the
condemned, seemed to speak to him of a tragedy that might be a key to
the mystery of Fort o' God. From the books he looked up at the picture
which had been turned to the wall. The temptation to see what was
hidden overcame him, and he turned the frame over. Then he stepped back
with a low cry of pleasure.

From out of the proscribed canvas there smiled down upon him a face of
bewildering beauty. It was the face of a young wo