ed. You will be quite safe going back now. The
snow will be deep, perhaps, but it is not far."

She went to the window, got his cap and gloves, and handed them to him. He
took them, dumbfounded and overcome.

"Say, I ain't done it right, mebbe, but I meant well, and I'd be good to
you and proud of you, and I'd love you better than anything I ever saw,"
he said, shamefacedly, but eagerly and honestly, too.

"Ah, you should have said those last words first," she answered.

"I say them now."

"They come too late; but they would have been too late in any case," she
added. "Still, I am glad you said them."

She opened the door for him.

"I made a mistake," he urged, humbly. "I understand better now. I never
had any schoolin'."

"Oh, it isn't that," she answered, gently. "Good-bye."

Suddenly he turned. "You're right--it couldn't ever be," he said.
"You're--you're great. And I owe you my life still!"

He stepped out into the biting air.

For a moment Pauline stood motionless in the middle of the room, her gaze
fixed upon the door which had just closed; then, with a wild gesture of
misery and despair, she threw herself upon the couch in a passionate
outburst of weeping. Sobs shook her from head to foot, and her hands,
clenched above her head, twitched convulsively.

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, w