picture on the wall! Oh! I will work so hard!"

"Get about the supper, Rina," said Mabyn shortly.

She prepared the meal at the rough mud fireplace built across the corner
of the shack, for they had no stove; and they ate squatting on the floor
in the breed fashion, for neither was there a table. Afterward Mabyn
dragged the bench--a relic of the former tenant, and sole article of
furniture they possessed--outside the door; and sat upon it, smoking,
yawning, looking across the lake with lack-lustre eyes.

Rina having redd up the shack, came to the doorway, where she stood
looking at him wistfully. Finally she hovered toward him and retreated;
and her hands stole to her breast. She was longing mightily to sit
beside him; but she did not dare. In a breed's wife it would have been
highly presumptuous, and would very likely have been rewarded with a
blow; but Rina had a dim notion that a white man's wife had the right to
sit beside him--still she was afraid. In the end her desire overcame her
fears; drifting hither and thither toward the bench like a frond of
thistledown, she finally alighted on the edge, and her cheek dropped on
his shoulder. The act must have been subtly suggested by the tincture of
white blood in her veins, for it is not a redskin attitude. The man
neither repulsed nor welcomed her.

"'Erbe't," she whispered, "my head is so full of things I am near crazy
wit' thoughts! And my tongue is in a snare; I cannot speak at all!"

Mabyn's only comment was a sort of grunt, which meant anything--or
nothing.

Rina was encouraged to creep a little closer. "Oh, 'Erbe't, I love you!"
she whispered. "I am loving you every minute! I so glad you marry me,
'Erbe't!"

The man took his pipe out of his mouth, and uttered his brief, jeering
cackle of laughter. "That wasn't altogether a matter of choice, my
girl," he said. "It was a little preliminary insisted on by your father
and mother."

Rina hardly took the sense of this. "But you do love me, 'Erbe't? jus' a
little?" she pleaded.

"You're all right, Rina," he said patronizingly. "I never was one to
make much of a fuss about a woman."

Little by little gathering courage, she began to pour out her soul for
the man she loved. "I never love any man but you, 'Erbe't," so ran the
naive confession; "the breed boys, they always come aroun' and show off.
I not lak them. They foolish and dirty; they eat same lak cocouche; and
they know not'ing; but they think themself so