She raised her head and strove to answer, but the words died on her lips. How he loathed himself, talking so smoothly to her while he hungered to take her in his arms and tell her how he loved her! Again he spoke. "I hope you will be happy with Snoqualmie, and--" She lifted her eyes with a sudden light flashing in their black depths. "Do you want me to hate him? Never speak his name to me again!" "He is to be your husband; nay, it is the wish of your father, and the great sachems approve it." "Can the sachems put love in my heart? Can the sachems make my heart receive him as its lord? Ah, this bitter custom of the father giving his daughter to whomsoever he will, as if she were a dog! And your lips sanction it!" Her eyes were full of tears. Scarcely realizing what he did, he tried to take her hand. The slender fingers shrank from his and were drawn away. "I do not sanction it, it is a bitter custom; but it is to be, and I only wished to smooth your pathway. I want to say or do something that will help you when I am gone." "Do you know what it would be for me to be an Indian's wife? To cut the wood, and carry the water, and prepare the food,--that would be sweet to do for one I loved. But to toil amid dirt and filth for a savage whom I could only abhor, to feel myself growing coarse and squalid with my surroundings,--I could not live!" She shuddered as she spoke, as if the very thought was horrible. "You hate this degraded Indian life as much as I do, and yet it is the life you would push me into," she continued, in a tone of mournful heart-broken reproach. It stung him keenly. "It is not the life I would push you into. God knows I would give my life to take one thorn from yours," The mad longing within him rushed into his voice in spite of himself, making it thrill with a passionate tenderness that brought the color back into her pallid cheek. "But I cannot remain," he went on, "I dare not; all that I can do is to say something that may help you in the future." She looked at him with dilated eyes full of pain and bewilderment. "I have no future if you go away. Why must you go? What will be left me after you are gone? Think how long I was here alone after my mother died, with no one to understand me, no one to talk to. Then you came, and I was happy. It was like light shining in the darkness; now it goes out and I can never hope again. Why must you go away and leave Wallulah in the dark?" There was a childlike plaintiveness and simplicity in her tone; and she came close to him, looking up in his face with wistful, pleading eyes, the beautiful face wan and drawn with bewilderment and pain, yet never so beautiful as now. Cecil felt the unspeakable cruelty of his attitude toward her, and his face grew white as death in an awful struggle between love and duty. But he felt that he must leave her or be disloyal to his God.