. "You're right--it couldn't ever be," he said.
"You're--you're great. And I owe you my life still."

He stepped out into the biting air.

For a moment Pauline stood motionless in the middle of the room, her
gaze fixed upon the door which had just closed; then, with a wild
gesture of misery and despair, she threw herself upon the couch in a
passionate outburst of weeping. Sobs shook her from head to foot, and
her hands, clenched above her head, twitched convulsively.

Presently the door opened and her mother looked in eagerly. At what she
saw her face darkened and hardened for an instant, but then the girl's
utter abandonment of grief and agony convinced and conquered her.
Some glimmer of the true understanding of the problem which Pauline
represented got into her heart, and drove the sullen selfishness from
her face and eyes and mind. She came over heavily and, sinking upon her
knees, swept an arm around the girl's shoulder. She realised what had
happened, and probably this was the first time in her life that she had
ever come by instinct to a revelation of her daughter's mind, or of the
faithful meaning of incidents of their lives.

"You said no to John Alloway," she murmured. Defiance and protest spoke
in the swift gesture of the girl's hands. "You think because he was
white that I'd drop into his arms! No--no--no!"

"You did right, little one."

The sobs suddenly stopped, and the girl seemed to listen with all her
body. There was something in her Indian mother's voice she had never
heard before--at least, not since she was a little child, and swung in a
deer-skin hammock in a tamarac tree by Renton's Lodge, where the chiefs
met, and the West paused to rest on its onward march. Something of the
accents of the voice that crooned to her then was in the woman's tones
now.

"He offered it like a lump of sugar to a bird--I know. He didn't know
that you have great blood--yes, but it is true. My man's grandfather, he
was of the blood of the kings of England. My man had the proof. And for
a thousand years my people have been chiefs. There is no blood in all
the West like yours. My heart was heavy, and dark thoughts came to me,
because my man is gone, and the life is not my life, and I am only an
Indian woman from the Warais, and my heart goes out there always now.
But some great Medicine has been poured into my heart. As I stood at the
door and saw you lying there, I called to the Sun. 'O great Spirit,' I
said, 'help