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.
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