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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 realized 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 deerskin 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 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.”