“Very little,” said Philip.

The flush of enthusiasm faded from Adare’s eyes.  It was replaced by a look that was grief deep and sincere.

“Iowaka’s death was the first great blow that came to Adare House,” he said gently.  “For nine years they were man and wife lovers.  God’s pity they had no children.  She was French—­with a velvety touch of the Cree, lovable as the wild flowers from which she took her name.  Since she went Jean has lived in a dream.  He says that she is constantly with him, and that often he hears her voice.  I am glad of that.  It is wonderful to possess that kind of a love, Philip!—­the love that lives like a fresh flower after death and darkness.  And we have it—­you and I.”

Philip murmured softly that it was so.  He felt that it was dangerous to tread upon the ground which Adare was following.  In these moments, when this great bent-shouldered giant’s heart lay like an open book before him, he was not sure of himself.  The other’s unbounded faith, his happiness, the idyllic fulness of his world as he found it, were things which added to the heaviness and fear at Philip’s heart instead of filling him with similar emotions.  Of these things he was not a part.  A voice kept whispering to him with maddening insistence that he was a fraud.  One by one John Adare was unlocking for him hallowed pictures in which Jean had told him he could never share possession.  His desire to see Josephine again was almost feverish, and filled him with a restlessness which he knew he must hide from Adare.  So when Adare’s eyes rested upon him in a moment’s silence, he said: 

“Last night Jean and I were standing beside her grave.  It seemed then as though he would have been happier if he had lain near her —­under the cross.”

“You are wrong,” said Adare quickly.  “Death is beautiful when there is a perfect love.  If my Miriam should die it would mean that she had simply gone from my sight.  In return for that loss her hand would reach down to me from Heaven, as Iowaka reaches down to Jean.  I love life.  My heart would break if she should go.  But it would be replaced by something almost like another soul.  For it must be wonderful to be over-watched by an angel.”

He rose and went to the window, and with a queer thickening in his throat Philip stared at his broad back.  He thought he saw a moment’s quiver of his shoulders.  Then Adare’s voice changed.

“Winter brings close to our doors the one unpleasant feature of this country,” he said, turning to light a second cigar.  “Thirty-five miles to the north and west of us there is what the Indians call ’Muchemunito Nek’—­the Devil’s Nest.  It’s a Free Trader’s house.  A man down in Montreal by the name of Lang owns a string of them, and his agent over at the Devil’s Nest is a scoundrel of the first water.  His name is Thoreau.  There are a score of half-breeds and whites in his crowd, and not a one of them with an