"Everything--everything--would have gone with her," he said. "If
you had let her die, I should have died. My God, what peril she
was in! In saving her you saved me. So you are welcome here, as a
son. For the first time since my Jeanne was a babe Fort o' God
offers itself to a man who is a stranger and its hospitality is
yours so long as its walls hang together. And as they have done
this for upward of two hundred years, M'sieur Philip, we may
conclude that our friendship is to be without end."
He clasped Philip's hands again, and two tears coursed down his
gray cheeks. It was difficult for Philip to restrain the joy his
words produced, which, coming from the lips of Jeanne's father,
lifted him suddenly into a paradise of hope. For many reasons he
had come to expect a none too warm reception at Fort o' God; he
had looked ahead to the place with a grim sort of fear, scarcely
definable; and here Jeanne's father was opening his arms to him.
Pierre was unapproachable; Jeanne herself was a mystery, filling
him alternately with hope and despair; D'Arcambal had accepted him
as a son. He could find no words adequate to his emotion; none
that could describe his own happiness, unless it was in a bold
avowal of his love for the girl he had saved.
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