what her father had done with her.

The drone of a man's voice from the Mission Parlor surprised her; for
Mr. Williams had gone off with her father to the Upper Pass.

"Here is Miss Eleanor, herself! We were just speaking about you,
Eleanor! This is an old friend of your father's, Mr. Matthews from
Saskatchewan!"

A little woman in gray drew Eleanor inside the Mission Parlor, a little
woman with a white transparent skin trenched by lines of care, but
somehow, when you looked twice, they were lines of beauty chiseled by
time. She was garbed in gray and her hair was almost white, but, from
the first time Eleanor had looked at her hands, the girl wanted to kiss
and cover them with her own--they were such beautifully kept hands but
so gnarled and misshapen with toil. There had been only one child; but
there were eighty Indian children in the Mission School. Had the love
dream paid toll for such toil--Eleanor had asked herself when first she
had seen the Missionary's wife. Now she knew that, whether the love
dream paid toll or not, love would do and was doing the same thing time
without end and everywhere.

Then, she became aware of the massive form of a man topped by an
enormous head of white hair rising in links and hinges from a chair in
the corner till his figure towered above the little woman.

"So this--is Eleanor--MacDonald? Well, well, well!"

He was shaking hands at each word. "A knew your grandfather well.
Many's the time we have raced the dogtrains down MacKenzie River an'
the canoes down the Saskatchewan! 'Twas your grandfather set the
bagpipes skirling when Governor Simpson used to come galloping down the
Columbia in the forties with his paddlers splitting the wind, a dark
fearsome man, child, but a brave one, tho' his heart was hard as his
hand, and his hand was iron--Bras de Fer, Arm of Iron, the Indians
called him; for his left hand, he lost in a duel; and his false hand
was a true hand of iron metal that made many a lazy voyageur bite the
dust. Bless me, but you are a MacDonald to your dainty feet--" holding
her off from him at arm's length. "Eyes true to pedigree, and the
curly hair, and the short upper lip, the only one of all the MacDonalds
that's kept the race type. 'Tis good to see you! A'm right glad to
see you! A'm gladder than you know-"

Eleanor did not wait for any second thought. "And did you know my
mother's people, too?"

The old man sat back in his corner. "No, A cannot