ike it. I guess--that I have been
taught to hate it--since I can remember."

There was a little tremble in Jeanne's voice, an instant's quivering of
her chin. Philip looked from her face into the fire, and stared hard,
choking back words which were ready to burst from his lips. In place of
them he said, with a touch of bitterness in his voice:

"And I have grown to hate my world, Jeanne. It has compelled me to hate
it. That is why I spoke to you that night on the cliff at Churchill."

"I have sometimes thought that I have been very wrong," said the girl.
"I have never seen this other world. I know nothing of it, except as I
have been taught. I have no right to hate it, and yet I do. I have
never wanted to see it. I have never cared to know the people who lived
in it. I wish that I could understand, but I cannot; except that father
has made for us, for Pierre and Otille and me, this little world at
Fort o' God, and has taught us to fear the other. I know that there is
no other man in the whole world like my father, and that what he has
done must be best. It is his pride that we bring your world to our
doors, but that we never go to it; he says that we know more about that
world than the people who live there, which of course cannot be so. And
so we have grown up amid the old memories, the pictures, and the dead
romances of Fort o' God. We have taken pleasure in living as we do--in
making for ourselves our own little social codes, our childish
aristocracy, our make-believe world. It is the spirit of Fort o' God
that lives with us, and makes us content; the shadow-faces of men and
women who once filled these rooms with life and pleasure, and whose
memory seems to have passed into our keeping alone. I know them all;
many of their names, all of their faces. I have a daguerreotype of
Camille Poitiers, and she must have been very beautiful. There are the
tiniest slippers in the world in her chest, and ribbons like those
which are tied about the pistols. There is a painting of D'Arcy in your
room. It is the picture next to the one that has its face turned to the
wall."

She rose to her feet, and Philip stood beside her. There was a mist in
her eyes as she held out her hand to him.

"I--I--would like to have you--see that picture," she whispered.

Philip could not speak. He held the hand Jeanne had given him as they
passed through the long, dimly lighted halls. At the open door to his
room they stopped, and he could feel J