e was no one else to love. And how could I be
ungrateful?"

She looked so charming in her eagerness that her father bent over and
kissed her. If her mother had been thus faithful!

"I shall never leave Detroit, little one. You may take up a sapling and
transplant it, but the old tree, never! It dies. The new soil is
strange, unfriendly."

"Do not tease her," said her father in a low tone. "It is all strange to
her, and she does not understand. Try to get her to tell her story of
the night you came."

At first Pani was very wary with true Indian suspicion. The Sieur
Angelot had much experience with these children of the forests and
wilderness. He understood their limited power of expansion, their
suspicions of anything outside of their own knowledge. But he led her on
skillfully, and his voice had the rare quality of persuasion, of
inducing confidence. In her French _patois_, with now and then an Indian
word, she began to live over those early years with the unstudied
eloquence of real love.

"Touchas is dead," interposed Jeanne. "But there is Wenonah, and, oh,
there is all the country outside, the pretty farms, the houses that are
not so crowded. In the spring many of them are whitewashed, and the
trees are in bloom, and the roses everywhere, and the birds singing--"

She paused suddenly and flushed, remembering the lovely island home with
all its beauty.

He laughed with a pleasant sound.

"I should think there would need to be an outside. I hardly see how one
can get his breath in the crowded streets," he answered.

"But there is all the beautiful river, and the air comes sweeping down
from the hills. And the canoeing. Oh, it is not to be despised," she
insisted.

"I shall cherish it because it has cherished thee. And now I must say
adieu for awhile. I am to talk over some matters with your officers, and
then--" there was the meeting with his wife. "And at five I will come
again. Child, thou art rarely sweet; much too sweet for convent walls."

"Is it unkind in me? I cannot make her seem my mother. Oh, I should love
her, pity her!"

There were tears in Jeanne's eyes, and her breath came with a great,
sorrowful throb.

"We will talk of all that to-morrow."

"Thou wilt not go?" Pani gave her a frightened, longing look, as if she
expected her to follow her father.

"Oh, not now. It is all so wonderful, Pani, like some of the books I
have read at the minister's. And M. St. Armand has come back, or will