She lifted her eyes with a sudden light flashing in their black
depths.

"Do you want me to hate him? Never speak his name to me again!"

"He is to be your husband; nay, it is the wish of your father, and the
great sachems approve it."

"Can the sachems put love in my heart? Can the sachems make my heart
receive him as its lord? Ah, this bitter custom of the father giving
his daughter to whomsoever he will, as if she were a dog! And your
lips sanction it!"

Her eyes were full of tears. Scarcely realizing what he did, he tried
to take her hand. The slender fingers shrank from his and were drawn
away.

"I do not sanction it, it is a bitter custom; but it is to be, and I
only wished to smooth your pathway. I want to say or do something that
will help you when I am gone."

"Do you know what it would be for me to be an Indian's wife? To cut
the wood, and carry the water, and prepare the food,--that would be
sweet to do for one I loved. But to toil amid dirt and filth for a
savage whom I could only abhor, to feel myself growing coarse and
squalid with my surroundings,--I could not live!"

She shuddered as she spoke, as if the very thought was horrible.

"You hate this degraded Indian life as much as I do, and yet it is the
life you would push me into," she continued, in a tone of mournful
heart-broken reproach. It stung him keenly.

"It is not the life I would push you into. God knows I would give my
life to take one thorn from yours," The mad longing within him rushed
into his voice in spite of himself, making it thrill with a passionate
tenderness that brought the color back into her pallid cheek. "But I
cannot remain," he went on, "I dare not; all that I can do is to say
something that may help you in the future."

She looked at him with dilated eyes full of pain and bewilderment.

"I have no future if you go away. Why must you go? What will be left
me after you are gone? Think how long I was here alone after my mother
died, with no one to understand me, no one to talk to. Then you came,
and I was happy. It was like light shining in the darkness; now it
goes out and I can never hope again. Why must you go away and leave
Wallulah in the dark?"

There was a childlike plaintiveness and simplicity in her tone; and
she came close to him, looking up in his face with wistful, pleading
eyes, the beautiful face wan and drawn with bewilderment and pain, yet
never so beautiful as now.

Cecil felt the unspeakable crue