“I love you, I love you,” he repeated, again and again, and he could find no other words than those.

For an instant her arms clung about his shoulders, and then, suddenly, they strained against him, and she tore herself free, and, with a cry so pathetic that it seemed as though her heart had broken in that moment, she fled from him, and out of the room.

XVIII

Philip stood where Jeanne had left him, his arms half reaching out to the vacant door through which she had fled, his lips parted as if to call her name, and yet motionless, dumb.  A moment before he was intoxicated by a joy that was almost madness.  He had held Jeanne in his arms; he had looked into her eyes, filled with surrender under his caresses and his avowal of love.  For a moment he had possessed her, and now he was alone.  The cry that had wrung itself from her lips, breaking in upon his happiness like a blow, still rang in his ears, and there was something in the exquisite pain of it that left him in torment.  Heart and soul, every drop of blood in him, had leaped in the joy of that glorious moment, when Jeanne’s eyes and sweet lips had accepted his love, and her arms had clung about his shoulders.  Now these things had been struck dead within him.  He felt again the fierce pressure of Jeanne’s arms as she had thrust him away, he saw the fright and torture that had leaped into her eyes as she sprang from him, as though his touch had suddenly become a sacrilege.  He lowered his arms slowly, and went to the hall.  It was empty.  He heard no sound, and closed the door.

It was so still that he could hear the excited throbbing of his own heart.  He looked at the picture again, and a strange fancy impressed him with the idea that it was no longer smiling at him, but that its eyes were turned to the door through which Jeanne had disappeared.  He moved his position, and the illusion was gone.  It was Jeanne looking down upon him again, an older and happier Jeanne than the one whom he loved.  For the first time he examined it closely.  In one corner of the canvas he found the artist’s name, Bourret, and after it the date, 1888.  Could it be the picture of Jeanne’s mother?  He told himself that it was impossible, for Jeanne’s mother had been found dead in the snow, five years later than the date of the canvas, and Pierre, the half-breed, had buried her somewhere out on the barren, so that she was a mystery to all but him.  Even the master of Fort o’ God, to whom he had brought the child, had never seen the woman upon whose cold breast Pierre had found the little Jeanne.