rlie--you who have studied my race and
their laws for years--do you mean to tell me that, because there was
no priest and no magistrate, my mother was not married? Do you mean
to say that all my forefathers, for hundreds of years back, have been
illegally born? If so, you blacken my ancestry beyond--beyond--beyond
all reason."

"No, Christie, I would not be so brutal as that; but your father
and mother live in more civilized times. Father O'Leary has been at
the post for nearly twenty years. Why was not your father straight
enough to have the ceremony performed when he _did_ get the chance?"

The girl turned upon him with the face of a fury. "Do you suppose,"
she almost hissed, "that my mother would be married according to
your _white_ rites after she had been five years a wife, and I had
been born in the meantime? No, a thousand times I say, _no_. When
the priest came with his notions of Christianizing, and talked
to them of re-marriage by the Church, my mother arose and said,
'Never--never--I have never had but this one husband; he has had
none but me for wife, and to have you re-marry us would be to say as
much to the whole world as that we had never been married before.
[Fact.] You go away; _I_ do not ask that _your_ people be re-married;
talk not so to me. I _am_ married, and you or the Church cannot do
or undo it.'"

"Your father was a fool not to insist upon the law, and so was the
priest."

"Law? _My_ people have _no_ priest, and my nation cringes not to
law. Our priest is purity, and our law is honor. Priest? Was there a
_priest_ at the most holy marriage know to humanity--that stainless
marriage whose offspring is the God you white men told my pagan
mother of?"

"Christie--you are _worse_ than blasphemous; such a profane remark
shows how little you understand the sanctity of the Christian
faith--"

"I know what I _do_ understand; it is that you are hating me because
I told some of the beautiful customs of my people to Mrs. Stuart and
those men."

"Pooh! who cares for them? It is not them; the trouble is they won't
keep their mouths shut. Logan's a cad and will toss the whole tale
about at the club to-morrow night; and as for the Stuart woman, I'd
like to know how I'm going to take you to Ottawa for presentation
and the opening, while she is blabbing the whole miserable scandal
in every drawing-room, and I'll be pointed out as a romantic fool,
and you--as worse; I _can't_ understand why your father d