en to ask that he might come. What trouble Lali had with one of the
servants that morning was never thoroughly explained, but certain it
is, she came to have a crude notion of why Frank Armour married her. The
servant was dismissed duly, but that was after the contre-temps.

It was late afternoon. Everybody had been busy, because one or two other
guests were expected besides Captain Vidall. Lali had kept to herself,
sending word through Richard that she would not "be English," as she
vaguely put it, that day. She had sent Mackenzie on some mission. She
sat on the floor of her room, as she used to sit on the ground in her
father's lodge. Her head was bowed in her hands, and her arms rested on
her knees. Her body swayed to and fro. Presently all motion ceased. She
became perfectly still. She looked before her as if studying something.

Her eyes immediately flashed. She rose quickly to her feet, went to her
wardrobe, and took out her Indian costume and blanket, with which she
could never be induced to part. Almost feverishly she took off the
clothes she wore and hastily threw them from her. Then she put on the
buckskin clothes in which she had journeyed to England, drew down her
hair as she used to wear it, fastened round her waist a long red sash
which had been given her by a governor of the Hudson's Bay Company
when he had visited her father's country, threw her blanket round her
shoulders, and then eyed herself in the great mirror in the room. What
she saw evidently did not please her perfectly, for she stretched out
her hands and looked at them; she shook her head at herself and put her
hand to her cheeks and pinched them, they were not so brown as they once
were, then she thrust out her foot. She drew it back quickly in disdain.
Immediately she caught the fashionable slippers from her feet and threw
them among the discarded garments. She looked at herself again. Still
she was not satisfied, but she threw up her arms, as with a sense
of pleasure and freedom, and laughed at herself. She pushed out her
moccasined foot, tapped the floor with it, nodded towards it, and said
a word or two in her own language. She heard some one in the next room,
possibly Mackenzie. She stepped to the door leading into the hall,
opened it, went out, travelled its length, ran down a back hallway, out
into the park, towards the stables, her blanket, as her hair, flying
behind her.

She entered the stables, made for a horse that she had ridden