was that had given the
waste places a voice. Yet--yet, there were his own people in the East,
there was another life waiting for him, there was the life of ambition and
wealth, and, and home--and children.

His eyes were misty as she turned to him with a little cry of surprise,
how much natural and how much assumed--for she had heard him enter--it
would have been hard to say. She was a woman, and therefore the daughter
of pretence even when most real. He caught her by both arms as she shyly
but eagerly came to him. "Good girl, good little girl," he said. He looked
round him. "Well, I've never seen our lodge look nicer than it does
to-night; and the fire, and the pot on the fire, and the smell of the
pine-cones, and the cedar-boughs, and the skins, and--"

"And everything," she said, with a queer little laugh, as she moved away
again to turn the steaks on the fire.

Everything! He started at the word. It was so strange that she should use
it by accident, when but a little while ago he had been ready to choke the
wind out of a man's body for using it concerning herself.

It stunned him for a moment, for the West, and the life apart from the
world of cities, had given him superstition, like that of the Indians,
whose life he had made his own.

Herself!--to leave her here, who had been so much to him? As true as the
sun she worshipped, her eyes had never lingered on another man since she
came to his lodge; and, to her mind, she was as truly sacredly married to
him as though a thousand priests had spoken, or a thousand Medicine Men
had made their incantations. She was his woman and he was her man. As he
chatted to her, telling her of much that he had done that day, and
wondering how he could tell her of _all_ he had done, he kept looking
round the lodge, his eye resting on this or that; and everything had its
own personal history, had become part of their lodge-life, because it had
a use as between him and her, and not a conventional domestic place. Every
skin, every utensil, every pitcher and bowl and pot and curtain had been
with them at one time or another when it became of importance and renowned
in the story of their days and deeds.

How could he break it to her--that he was going to visit his own people,
and that she must be alone with her mother all winter, to await his return
in the spring? His return? As he watched her sitting beside him, helping
him to his favorite dish, the close, companionable trust and gent