"You are making fun of me," he remonstrated. "Tell me—where is this Fort o' God, and what is it?"
"It is far up the Churchill, M'sieur Philip. It is a log chateau, built hundreds and hundreds of years ago, I guess. My father, Pierre, and I, with one other, live there alone among the savages. I have never been so far away from home before."
"I suppose," said Philip, "that the savages up your way converse in Latin, Greek, and German—"
"Latin, FRENCH, and German," corrected Jeanne. "We haven't added a Greek course yet."
"I know of a girl," mused Philip, as though speaking to himself, "who spent five years in a girls' college, and she can talk nothing but light English. Her name is Eileen Brokaw."
Jeanne looked up, but only to point to the coffee.
"It is done," she advised, "unless you like it bitter."
XIII
Philip knew that Jeanne was watching him as he lifted the coffee from the fire and placed the pot on the ground to cool. His mind was in a hopeless tangle—a riot of things he would like to say, throbbing with a hundred questions he would like to ask, one after another. And yet Jeanne seemed bewitchingly unconscious of his uneasiness. Not one of his references to names and events so vital to himself had in any way produced a change in her. Was she, after all, innocent of all knowledge in the things he wished to know? Was it possible that she was entirely ignorant as to the identity of the men who had attacked Pierre and herself on the cliff? Was it true that she did not know Eileen Brokaw, that she had never heard of Lord Fitzhugh Lee, and that she had always lived among the wild people of the north? By what miracle performed here in the heart of a savage world could this girl talk to him in German and Latin? Was she making fun of him? He turned to look at her and found her dark, clear eyes upon him. She smiled at him in a tired little way, and he saw nothing but sweetness and truth in her face. In an instant every suspicion was swept away. He felt like a criminal for having doubted her; and for a moment he was on the point of confessing to her what had been in his thoughts. He restrained himself, and went to the river to wash the pot-black from his hands. Jeanne was a mystery to him, a mystery that delighted him and filled him each moment with a deeper love. He saw the life and freedom of the forests in her every movement—in the gesture of her hands, the bird-like poise of her pretty head, the lithe grace of her slender body. She breathed the forests. It glowed in her eyes, in the rich red of her lips, and revealed its beauty and strength in the unconfined wealth of her gold-brown hair. In a dozen ways he could see her primitiveness, her kinship to the wilderness. She had told him the truth. Her eyes smiled truth at him as he came up the bank. No other woman's eyes had ever looked at him like hers; none had he seen so beautiful. And yet in them he saw nothing that she would not have expressed in words—companionship, trust, thankfulness that he was there to care for her. Such eyes as those belonged only to the wilderness, brimming with the flawless beauty of an undefiled nature. He had seen them, but not so beautiful, in Cree women. He thought of Eileen Brokaw's eyes as he looked at Jeanne's. They were very beautiful, but they were DIFFERENT. Jeanne's could not lie.