rapidly, and the finger which she pointed at Lapierre
trembled violently.

"You lied!" cried the girl. "You have always lied! You lied when you
told me we were married. You lied when you said you would return! Since
coming to this school I have learned much. Many things have I learned
that I never knew before. When you said you would return, I believed
you--even as my mother believed my father when he went away in the ship
many years ago, and left me a babe in arms to live or to die among the
teepees of the Louchoux, the people of my mother, who was the mother of
his child. My mother has not been to the school, and she believes some
day my father will return. For many years she has waited, has starved,
and has suffered--always watching for my father's return. And the
factors have laughed, and the rivermen taunted her with being the mother
of a fatherless child! Ah, she has paid! Always the Indian women must
pay! And I have paid also. All my life have I been hungry, and in the
winter I have always been cold.

"Then you came with your laughing lips and your words of love and I went
with you, and you took me to distant rivers. All through the summer
there was plenty to eat in our teepee. I was happy, and for the first
time in my life my heart was glad--for I loved you! And then came the
winter, and the freezing up of the rivers, and the day you told me you
must return to the southward--to the land of the white men--without me.
And I believed you even when they told me you would not return. I was
brave--for that is the way of love, to believe, and to hope, and to be
brave."

The girl's voice faltered, and the trembling hand gripped the back of the
chair upon which she leaned heavily for support.

"All my life have I paid," she continued, bitterly. "Yet, it was not
enough. Years, when the children of the trappers had at times plenty to
eat I was always hungry and cold.

"When you came into my life I thought at last I had paid in full--that my
mother and I both had paid for her belief in the white man's word. Ah,
if I had known! I should have known, for well I remember, it was upon
the day before--before I went away with you--that I told you of my
father, and of how we always went North in the winter, knowing that again
his ship would winter in the ice of the Bufort Sea. And you heard the
story and laughed, and you said that my father would not return--that the
white men never return. And when I gr