white man's home. But not John Alloway--shall the crow nest with the
oriole?"

As the woman spoke with slow, measured voice, full of the cadences of a
heart revealing itself, the girl's breath at first seemed to stop, so
still she lay; then, as the true understanding of the words came to her,
she panted with excitement, her breast heaved, and the blood flushed her
face. When the slow voice ceased, and the room became still, she lay
quiet for a moment, letting the new thing find secure lodgment in her
thought; then, suddenly, she raised herself and threw her arms round her
mother in a passion of affection.

"Lalika! O mother Lalika!" she said tenderly, and kissed her again and
again. Not since she was a little girl, long before they left the
Warais, had she called her mother by her Indian name, which her father
had humorously taught her to do in those far-off happy days by the
beautiful, singing river and the exquisite woods, when, with a bow
and arrow, she had ranged a young Diana who slew only with love.

"Lalika, mother Lalika, it is like the old, old times," she added softly.
"Ah, it does not matter now, for you understand!"

"I do not understand altogether," murmured the Indian woman gently.
"I am not white, and there is a different way of thinking; but I will
hold your hand, and we will live the white life together."

Cheek to cheek they saw the darkness come, and, afterwards, the silver
moon steal up over a frozen world, in which the air bit like steel and
braced the heart like wine. Then, at last, before it was nine o'clock,
after her custom, the Indian woman went to bed, leaving her daughter