"Don't joke. We ought to have thought of all this before."

"But when we first knew them, in the dear old cabin, there wasn't any
other woman and nobody to gossip, and that's what made it so nice. I
don't think so very much of civilization, do you?" said the young lady
pertly.

Christie did not reply. Perhaps she was thinking the same thing. It
certainly had been very pleasant to enjoy the spontaneous and chivalrous
homage of these men, with no further suggestion of recompense or
responsibility than the permission to be worshipped; but beyond that she
racked her brain in vain to recall any look or act that proclaimed the
lover. These men, whom she had found so relapsed into barbarism that
they had forgotten the most ordinary forms of civilization; these
men, even in whose extravagant admiration there was a certain loss of
self-respect, that as a woman she would never forgive; these men, who
seemed to belong to another race--impossible! Yet it was so.

"What construction must they have put upon her father's acceptance of
their presents--of their company--of her freedom in their presence? No!
they must have understood from the beginning that she and her sister
had never looked upon them except as transient hosts and chance
acquaintances. Any other idea was preposterous. And yet--"

It was the recurrence of this "yet" that alarmed her. For she remembered
now that but for their slavish devotion they might claim to be her
equal. According to her father's account, they had come from homes as
good as their own; they were certainly more than her equal in fortune;
and her father had come to them as an employee, until they had taken him