I was five or six.
Then Angus McRae saw me one day. He liked me, so he bought me for
three yards of tobacco, a looking-glass, and five wolf pelts."

It may perhaps have been by chance that the girl's eyes met those of
Morse. The blood burned beneath the tan of her dusky cheeks, but her
proud eyes did not flinch while she told the damning facts about her
parentage and life. She was of the metis, the child of an unknown
father. So far as she knew her mother had never been married. She had
been bought and sold like a negro slave in the South. Let any one that
wanted to despise her make the most of all this.

So far as any expression went Tom Morse looked hard as pig iron. He
did not want to blunder, so he said nothing. But the girl would have
been amazed if she could have read his thoughts. She seemed to him a
rare flower that has blossomed in a foul swamp.

"If Angus McRae took you for his daughter, it was because he loved
you," Beresford said gently.

"Yes." The mobile face was suddenly tender with emotion. "What can any
father do more than he has done for me? I learned to read and write at
his knee. He taught me the old songs of Scotland that he's so fond of.
He tried to make me good and true. Afterward he sent me to Winnipeg to
school for two years."

"Good for Angus McRae," the young soldier said.

She smiled, a little wistfully. "He wants me to be Scotch, but of
course I can't be that even though I sing 'Should auld acquaintance'
to him. I'm what I am."

Ever since she had learned to think for herself, she had struggled
against the sense of racial inferiority. Even in the Lone Lands men
of education had crossed her path. There was Father Giguere, tall and
austere and filled with the wisdom of years, a scholar who had left
his dear France to serve on the outposts of civilization. And there
was the old priest's devoted friend Philip Muir, of whom the story ran
that he was heir to a vast estate across the seas. Others she had seen
at Winnipeg. And now this scarlet-coated soldier Beresford.

Instinctively she recognized the difference between them and the
trappers and traders who frequented the North woods. In her bed at
night she had more than once wept herself to sleep because life had
built an impassable barrier between what she was and what she wanted
to be.

"To the Scot nobody is quite like a Scot," Beresford admitted with
a smile. "When he wants to make you one, Mr. McRae pays you a great
compliment"