"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 heard of the dead white wife of Multnomah, and of her daughter, who, it was understood among the tribes, was to be given to Snoqualmie. He noticed, too, for the first time the trace of the Indian in her expression, as the light faded from it and it settled back into the despondent look habitual to it. All that was chivalrous in his nature went out to the fair young creature; all his being responded to the sting of her disappointment. "I am not what you hoped I was, but your face is like the face of the women of my own land. Shall we not be friends?" She looked up wistfully at the handsome and noble countenance above her, so different from the stolid visages she had known so long. "Yes; you are not Indian." In that one expression she unconsciously told Cecil how her sensitive nature shrank from the barbarism around her; how the tastes and aspirations she had inherited from her mother reached out for better and higher things. In a little while they were seated on a grassy bank in the shade of the trees, talking together. She bade him tell her of his people. She listened intently; the bright, beautiful look came back as she heard the tale. "They are kind to women, instead of making them mere burden-bearers; they have pleasant homes; they dwell in cities? Then they are like my mother's people." "They are gentle, kind, humane. They have all the arts that light up life and make it beautiful,--not like the tribes of this grim, bloodstained land."