me to understand; for this girl is bone of my bone and flesh
of my flesh, and Evil has come between us!' And the Sun Spirit poured
the Medicine into my spirit, and there is no cloud between us now. It
has passed away, and I see. Little white one, the white life is the only
life, and I will live it with you till a white man comes and gives you
a white man's home. But not John Alloway--shall the crow nest with the
oriole?"

As the woman spoke with slow, measured voice, full of the cadences of
a heart revealing itself, the girl's breath at first seemed to stop, so
still she lay; then, as the true understanding of the words came to her,
she panted with excitement, her breast heaved, and the blood flushed
her face. When the slow voice ceased, and the room became still, she lay
quiet for a moment, letting the new thing find secure lodgment in her
thought; then, suddenly, she raised herself and threw her arms round her
mother in a passion of affection.

"Lalika! O mother Lalika!" she said tenderly, and kissed her again
and again. Not since she was a little girl, long before they left the
Warais, had she called her mother by her Indian name, which her father
had humorously taught her to do in those far-off happy days by the
beautiful, singing river and the exquisite woods, when, with a bow and
arrow, she had ranged a young Diana who slew only with love.

"Lalika, mother Lalika, it is like the old, old times," she added
softly. "Ah, it does not matter now, for you understand!"

"I do not understand altogether," murmured the Indian woman gently. "I
am not white, and there is a different way of thinking; but I will hold
your hand, and we will live the white life together."

Cheek to cheek they saw the darkness come, and, afterwards, the silver
moon steal up over a frozen world, in which the air bit like steel and
braced the heart like wine. Then, at last, before it was nine o'clock,
after her custom, the Indian woman went to bed, leaving her daughter
brooding peacefully by the fire.

For a long time Pauline sat with hands clasped in her lap, her gaze on
the tossing flames, in her heart and mind a new feeling of strength and
purpose. The way before her was not clear, she saw no further than this
day, and all that it had brought; yet she was as one that has crossed
a direful flood and finds herself on a strange shore in an unknown
country, with the twilight about her, yet with so much of danger passed
that there was only the