"Certainly not. Look here. Let us put the case fairly and without prejudice. Supposing you had lived the ordinary society life. You might, as hundreds have done before you, have married some vulgar _parvenu_--we'll say from force of circumstances--or a fellow who got drunk on the quiet and threw empty bottles at you, or some execrable gutterling who happened to be rolling in money. Civilised men and Christians, mind. I am brutally frank, you see. Or again, more than one Englishwoman of birth and breeding has been known to espouse some slant-eyed, sallow-skinned Oriental for the sake of his rank and jewels, sometimes not even that. Well, you have allowed that Mahto-sapa, as a man, is not contemptible either in aspect or qualities. Now I call him a king in comparison with such as I have just mentioned. Of those who would define him as a heathen and a savage, not one in a hundred could boast half his good points. My opinion is that you have shown sound judgment in making the best of the situation." "Do you know, you have taken a weight off my mind. I had often thought of what you now say, but required someone else's opinion. No, I shall live and die among these people. But you? I will think out and form some plan for you to escape, but I do not disguise from you that it will be difficult and risky. And should you find yourself threatened with immediate danger, do not delay, take refuge at once in my lodge. I believe they would hesitate to pursue you there." She rose from her seat with a lithe, rapid movement, grasped his hand, and glided from the lodge. CHAPTER THIRTY SIX. A TARDY REPARATION. Vipan, left alone, felt drowsy, and kicking up the lodge fire into a blaze, rolled himself in a blanket and lay down in the long wicker basket which did duty as his bed. But sleep refused to come. This strange meeting had something weird about it. That this woman, whose selfish reticence had ruined his life, to screen whom he had sacrificed his prospects up to blighting point, as to whose whereabouts he had long ceased to speculate, should appear before him alone in the camp of the hostile Sioux--living there as one of themselves--struck him as little short of miraculous, and a superstitious feeling seemed to warn him, eagerly as he strove to dismiss it, that an occurrence so startling, so entirely out of all reckoning, portended some grave crisis to himself. Was her appearance after all these years destined to herald some other turning-point in his life? Thus musing, sleep at length overcame him, and still his dreams were haunted by the sad face of the ex-society belle, doomed to spend her life among savages, even resigned to that deplorable destiny.