ce that he wanted to marry
me--at the raising of the flag, when we were on the water, and one
Sunday in the autumn. I am not as old as Rose De Ber, even, so Marie
need not feel set upon a pinnacle because Tony Beeson marries her when
she is barely fifteen."

"Jeanne!" Pani's tone was horror stricken. "And it will make no end of
trouble. Madame De Ber is none too pleasant now."

"It will make no trouble. I said 'no' and 'no' and 'no,' until it was
like this mighty wind rushing through the forest, and he was very angry.
So I should not go to the De Bers any more. And, Pani, if I had a father
who would make me marry him when I was older, I should go and throw
myself into the Strait."

"His father sends him up in the fur country in the spring."

"What makes people run crazy when weddings are talked of? But if I
wanted to hold my head high and boast--"

"Oh, child, you could not be so silly!"

"No, Pani. And I shall be glad to have him go away. I do not want any
lovers."

The woman was utterly amazed, and then consoled herself with the thought
that it was merely child's play. They both lapsed into silence again.
But Jeanne's thoughts ran on. There was Louis Marsac. What if he
returned next summer and tormented her? A perplexing mood, half pride,
half disgust, filled her, and a serious elation at her own power which
thrills young feminine things when they first discover it; as well as
the shrinking into a new self-appropriation that thrusts out all such
matters. But she did not laugh over Louis Marsac. She felt afraid of
him, and she scrubbed her mouth where he had once kissed it.

There was another kiss on her hand. She held it up in the firelight. Ah,
if she had a father like M. St. Armand, and a brother like the young
man!

She was seized with an awful pang as if a swift, dark current was
bearing her away from every one but Pani. Why had her father and mother
been wrenched out of her life? She had seen a plant or a young shrub
swept out of its rightful place and tossed to and fro until some
stronger wave threw it upon the sandy edge, to droop and die. Was she
like that? Where had she been torn from? She had been thrown into Pani's
lap. She had never minded the little jeers before when the children had
called her a wild Indian. Was she nobody's child?

She had an impulse to jump about and storm around the room, to drag some
secret out of Pani, to grasp the world in her small hands and compel it
to disclose its