Flower of the North eBook

James Oliver Curwood
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 281 pages of information about Flower of the North.

Flower of the North eBook

James Oliver Curwood
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 281 pages of information about Flower of the North.

Laughter rippled in her throat.  She held out another olive to him, her face aglow.  Firelight danced in her hair, flooding its darker shadows with lights of red and gold.

“I was sure of it,” he exclaimed, convinced.  “That’s post-graduate Latin and senior German, or I’m as mad as a March hare!  Where—­ where did you go to school?”

“At Fort o’ God.  Quick, M’sieur Philip, the water is boiling over!”

Philip sprang to the fire.  Jeanne handed him coffee, and set out cold meat and bread.  For the first time that night he pulled out his pipe and filled it with tobacco.

“You don’t mind if I smoke, do you, Miss Jeanne?” he groaned.  “Under some circumstances tobacco is the only thing that will hold me up.  Do you know that you are shaking my confidence in you?”

“I have told you nothing but the truth,” retorted Jeanne, innocently.  She was still busying herself over the pack, but Philip caught the slightest gleam of her laughing teeth.

“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. 

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Flower of the North from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.