epeating this at her sewing. She boasted to Marie
Grignon--"Lazarre cannot leave me!--Paul taught me that."

My Cloud-Mother asked me to tell her the stories she used to tell me.
She had forgotten them.

"I am the child now," she would say. "Tell me the stories."

I repeated mythical tribe legends, gathered from Skenedonk on our long
rides, making them as eloquent as I could. She listened, holding her
breath, or sighing with contentment.

If any one in the household smiled when she led me about by the hand,
there was a tear behind the smile.

She kept herself in perfection, bestowing unceasing care upon her dress,
which was always gray.

"I have to wear gray; I am in a cloud," she had said to the family.

"We have used fine gray stuff brought from Holland, and wools that
Mother Ursule got from Montreal," Katarina told me. "The Pawnees dye
with vegetable colors. But they cannot make the pale gray she loves."

Eagle watched me with maternal care. If a hair dropped on my collar she
brushed it away, and smoothed and settled my cravat. The touch of my
Cloud-Mother, familiar and tender, like the touch of a wife, charged
through me with torture, because she was herself so unconscious of it.

Before I had been in the house a week she made a little pair of trousers
a span long, and gave them to me. Marie and Katarina turned their faces
to laugh. My Cloud-Mother held the garment up for their inspection, and
was not at all sensitive to the giggles it provoked.

"I made over an old pair of his father's," she said.

The discarded breeches used by the pouched turkey had been devoted to
her whim. Every stitch was neatly set. I praised her beautiful
needlework, and she said she would make me a coat.

Skenedonk was not often in the house. He took to the winter hunting and
snow-shoeing with vigor. Whenever he came indoors I used to see him
watching Madame de Ferrier with saturnine wistfulness. She paid no
attention to him. He would stand gazing at her while she sewed; being
privileged as an educated Indian and my attendant, to enter the family
room where the Pawnees came only to serve. They had the ample kitchen
and its log fire to themselves. I wondered what was working in
Skenedonk's mind, and if he repented calling one so buffeted, a
sorceress.

Kindly ridicule excited by the incongruous things she did, passed over
without touching her. She was enveloped in a cloud, a thick case
guarding overtaxed mind and body, and shu