She smiled at him in a tired little way, and he saw nothing but sweetness and truth in her face.  In an instant every suspicion was swept away.  He felt like a criminal for having doubted her; and for a moment he was on the point of confessing to her what had been in his thoughts.  He restrained himself, and went to the river to wash the pot-black from his hands.  Jeanne was a mystery to him, a mystery that delighted him and filled him each moment with a deeper love.  He saw the life and freedom of the forests in her every movement—­in the gesture of her hands, the bird-like poise of her pretty head, the lithe grace of her slender body.  She breathed the forests.  It glowed in her eyes, in the rich red of her lips, and revealed its beauty and strength in the unconfined wealth of her gold-brown hair.  In a dozen ways he could see her primitiveness, her kinship to the wilderness.  She had told him the truth.  Her eyes smiled truth at him as he came up the bank.  No other woman’s eyes had ever looked at him like hers; none had he seen so beautiful.  And yet in them he saw nothing that she would not have expressed in words—­companionship, trust, thankfulness that he was there to care for her.  Such eyes as those belonged only to the wilderness, brimming with the flawless beauty of an undefiled nature.  He had seen them, but not so beautiful, in Cree women.  He thought of Eileen Brokaw’s eyes as he looked at Jeanne’s.  They were very beautiful, but they were different.  Jeanne’s could not lie.

On a white napkin Jeanne had spread out cold meat, bread, pickles, and cheese, and Philip brought her the coffee.  He noticed that she was resting a little of her weight upon her injured ankle.

“Better?” he asked, indicating the bandaged ankle with a nod of his head.

“Much,” replied Jeanne, as tersely.  “I’m going to try standing upon it in a few minutes.  But not now.  I’m starved.”

She gave him his coffee and began eating with a relish that made him want to sit back and watch her.  Instead, he joined her; and they ate like two hungry children.  It was when she turned him out a second cup of coffee that Philip noticed her hand tremble a little.

“If Pierre was here we would be quite happy, M’sieur Philip,” she said, uneasily.  “I can’t understand why he asked you to run away with me to Fort o’ God.  If he is not badly hurt, as you have told me, why do we not hide and wait for him?  He would overtake us to-morrow.”

“There—­there was no time to talk over plans,” answered Philip, inwardly embarrassed for a moment by the unexpectedness of Jeanne’s question.  A vision of Pierre, bleeding and unconscious on the cliff, leaped into his mind, and the thought that he had lied to Jeanne and must still make her believe what was half false sickened him.  There was, after all, a chance that Pierre would never again come up the Churchill.  “Perhaps Pierre thought we would be hotly pursued,” he went on, seeing no escape from the demand in the girl’s eyes.  “In that event it would be best for me to get you to Fort o’ God as quickly as possible.  You must remember that Pierre was thinking of you.  He can care for himself.  It may take him two or three days to get back the strength of—­of his arm,” he finished, blindly.