“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.

“No, M’sieur.  Pierre’s real sister is at Fort o’ God.  I am the one whom he found out on the barren.”

To the night sounds there was added a heart-broken sob, and Jeanne disappeared in the tent.

XIV

Philip sat where Jeanne had left him.  He was powerless to move or to say a word that might have recalled her.  Her own grief, quivering in that one piteous sob, overwhelmed him.  It held him mute and listening, with the hope that each instant the tent-flap might open and Jeanne reappear.  And yet if she came he had no words to say.  Unwittingly he had probed deep into one of those wounds that never heal, and he realized that to ask forgiveness would be but another blunder.  He almost groaned as he thought of what he had done.  In his desire to understand, to know more about Jeanne, he had driven her into a corner.  What he had forced from her he might have learned a little later from Pierre or from the father at Fort o’ God.  He thought that Jeanne must despise him now, for he had taken advantage of her helplessness and his own position.  He had saved her from her enemies; and in return she had opened her heart, naked and bleeding, to his eyes.  What she had told him was not a voluntary confidence; it was a confession wrung from her by the rack of his questionings—­the confession that she was a waif-child, that Pierre was not her brother, and that the man at Fort o’ God was not her father.  He had gone to the very depths of that which was sacred to herself and those whom she loved.