He waited, trembling. It seemed an eternity before Jeanne answered. And then she said:
"He is my father, M'sieur Philip."
Philip could not speak. Darkness hid him from Jeanne. She did not see that which leaped into his face, and that for a moment he was on the point of flinging himself at her feet.
"You spoke of yourself, of Pierre, of your father, and of one other at Fort o' God," said Philip. "I thought that he—the other—was your tutor."
"No, it is Pierre's sister," replied Jeanne.
"Your sister! You have a sister?"
He could hear Jeanne catch her breath.
"Listen, M'sieur,'" she said, after a moment. "I must tell you a little about Pierre, a story of something that happened a long, long time ago. It was in the middle of a terrible winter, and Pierre was then a boy. One day he was out hunting and he came upon a trail—the trail of a woman who had dragged herself through the snow in her moccasined feet. It was far out upon a barren, where there was no life, and he followed. He found her, M'sieur, and she was dead. She had died from cold and starvation. An hour sooner he might have saved her, for, wrapped up close against her breast, he found a little child—a baby girl, and she was alive. He brought her to Fort o' God, M'sieur—to a noble man who lived there almost alone; and there, through all these years, she has lived and grown up. And no one knows who her mother was, or who her father was, and so it happens that Pierre, who found her, is her brother, and the man who has loved her and cared for her is her father."
"And she is the other at Fort o' God—Pierre's sister," said Philip.
Jeanne rose from the rock and moved toward the tent, glimmering indistinctly in the night. Her voice came back chokingly.