is eager eyes drinking in the welcome sight, yet scarcely
believing what he saw.

She had not yet observed him. The profile of her half-averted face was
very sweet and feminine; her form was rounded, and her hair fell in
long black ringlets to the shoulders. He was in the presence of a
young and beautiful woman,--a white woman! All this he noted at a
glance; noted, too, the drooping lashes, the wistful lines about the
lips, the mournful expression that shadowed the beauty of her face.

Who was she? Where could she have come from?

She heard the approaching footsteps and turned toward him. Absolute
bewilderment was on her face for a moment, and then it glowed with
light and joy. Her dark, sad eyes sparkled. She was radiant, as if
some great, long-looked for happiness had come to her. She came
eagerly toward him, holding out her hands in impetuous welcome; saying
something in a language he did not understand, but which he felt could
not be Indian, so refined and pleasing were the tones.

He answered he knew not what, in his own tongue, and she paused
perplexed. Then he spoke again, this time in Willamette.

She shrank back involuntarily.

"That language?" she replied in the same tongue, but with a tremor of
disappointment in her voice. "I thought you were of my mother's race
and spoke her language. But you _are_ white, like her people?"

She had given him both her hands, and he stood holding them; looking
down into her eager, lifted face, where a great hope and a great doubt
in mingled light and shadow strove together.

"I am a white man. I came from a land far to the East. But who are
you, and how came you here?"

She did not seem to hear the last words, only the first.

"No, no," she protested eagerly, "you came not from the East but from
the West, the land across the sea that my mother came from in the ship
that was wrecked." And she withdrew one hand and pointed toward the
wooded range beyond which lay the Pacific.

He shook his head. "No, there are white people in those lands too, but
I never saw them. I came from the East," he said, beginning to surmise
that she must be an Asiatic. She drew away the hand that he still held
in his, and her eyes filled with tears.

"I thought you were one of my mother's people," she murmured; and he
felt that the pang of an exceeding disappointment was rilling her
heart.

"Who are you?" he asked gently.

"The daughter of Multnomah."

Cecil remembered now what he had