figure which the storm
and struggle in her did not smother. The white women of Portage la Drome
were too blind, too prejudiced, to see all that she really was, and
admiring white men could do little, for Pauline would have nothing to do
with them till the women met her absolutely as an equal; and from the
other half-breeds, who intermarried with one another and were content to
take a lower place than the pure whites, she held aloof, save when any of
them was ill or in trouble. Then she recognized the claim of race, and
came to their doors with pity and soft impulses to help them. French and
Scotch and English half-breeds, as they were, they understood how she was
making a fight for all who were half-Indian, half-white, and watched her
with a furtive devotion, acknowledging her superior place, and proud of
it.

"I will not stay here," said the Indian mother, with sullen stubbornness.
"I will go back beyond the Warais. My life is my own life, and I will do
what I like with it."

The girl started, but became composed again on the instant. "Is your life
all your own, mother?" she asked. "I did not come into the world of my own
will. If I had I would have come all white or all Indian. I am your
daughter, and I am here, good or bad--is your life all your own?"

"You can marry and stay here, when I go. You are twenty. I had my man,
your father, when I was seventeen. You can marry. There are men. You have
money. They will marry you--and forget the rest."

With a cry of rage and misery the girl sprang to her feet and started
forward, but stopped suddenly at sound of a hasty knocking and a voice
asking admittance. An instant later, a huge, bearded, broad-shouldered man
stepped inside, shaking himself free of the snow, laughing half-sheepishly
as he did so, and laying his fur cap and gloves with exaggerated care on
the wide window-sill.

"John Alloway," said the Indian woman, in a voice of welcome and with a
brightening eye, for it would seem as though he came in answer to her
words of a few moments before. With a mother's instinct she had divined at
once the reason for the visit, though no warning thought crossed the mind
of the girl, who placed a chair for their visitor with a heartiness which
was real--was not this the white man she had saved from death in the snow
a year ago? Her heart was soft toward the life she had kept in the world.
She smiled at him, all the anger gone from her eyes, and there was almost
a touch of