“Where is Jean?” he asked.

Josephine shook her head.

“I haven’t seen him since last night.”

“I had almost forgotten what I believe he intended me to tell you,” said Philip.  “He has gone somewhere in the forest.  He may be away all day.”

Philip saw the anxious look that crept into Josephine’s eyes.  She looked at him closely, questioningly, yet he guessed that beyond what he had said she wanted him to remain silent.  A little later, when Adare and his wife were walking ahead of them, she asked: 

“Where is Jean?  What did he tell you last night?”

Philip remembered Jean’s warning.

“I cannot tell you,” he replied evasively.  “Perhaps he has gone out to reconnoitre for—­game.”

“You are true,” she breathed softly.  “I guess I understand.  Jean doesn’t want me to know.  But after I went to bed I lay awake a long time and thought of you—­out in the night with that gun in your hand.  I can’t believe that you were there simply because of a noise, as you said.  A man like you doesn’t hunt for a noise with a pistol, Philip.  What is the matter with your arm?”

The directness of her question startled him.

“Why do you ask that?” he managed to stammer.

“You have flinched twice when I touched it—­this arm.”

“A trifle,” he assured her.  “It should have healed by this time.”

She smiled straight up into his eyes.

“You are too true to tell me fairy stories in a way that I must believe them, Philip.  Day before yesterday your sleeves were up when you were paddling, and there was nothing wrong with this arm —­this forearm—­then.  But I’m not going to question you.  You don’t want me to know.”  In the same breath she recalled his attention to her father and mother.  “I told you they were lovers.  Look!”

As if she had been a little child John Adare had taken his wife up in his arms and sat her high on the trunk of a fallen tree that was still held four or five feet above the ground by a crippled spruce.  Philip heard him laugh.  He saw the wife lean over, still clinging for safety to her husband’s shoulders.

“It is beautiful,” he said.

Josephine spoke as if she had not heard him.

“I do not believe there is another man in the world quite like my father.  I cannot understand how a woman could cease to love such a man as he even for a day—­an hour.  She couldn’t forget, could she?”

There was something almost plaintive in her question.  As if she feared an answer, she went on quickly: 

“He has made her happy.  She is almost forty—­thirty-nine her last birthday.  She does not look that old.  She has been happy.  Only happiness keeps one young.  And he is fifty.  If it wasn’t for his beard, I believe he would appear ten years younger.  I have never known him without a beard; I like him that way.  It makes him look ’beasty’—­and I love beasts.”