When the Bannock brethren came, late in September, the next year, she walked the sagebrush paths to their encampment with her young son in her arms. They looked at the boy and said that it was good; but when they asked after the father, and Meta told them that he had gone with his troop to Fort Custer, and that she waited for word to join him, they said it was not good, and they turned away their eyes in silence from her shame. The men did, but the women looked at her in a silence that said different things. Her heart went out to them, and their dumb soft glances brought healing to her wounds. What sorrow, what humiliation, was hers that they from all time had not known? The men took little notice of her after that: she had lost caste both as maid and wife; she was nothing now but a means of existence to her son. But between her and her dark sisters the natural bond grew strong. Old lessons that had lain dormant in her blood revived with the force of her keener intelligence, and supplanted later teachings that were of no use now except to make her suffer more. It was impossible that Mother Meadows should not resent the wrong and insult to her own child; she felt it increasingly as she came to realize the girl's unhappiness. It grew upon her, and she could not feel the same towards Meta, who kept herself more and more proudly and silently aloof. She was one alone in the house, where no one spoke of the past to reproach her, where nothing but kindness was ever shown. The kindness was like the hand of pardon held out to her. Why did they think she wanted their forgiveness? She was not sorry for what she had done. She wanted nothing, only Henniker. So she crept away with her child and sat among the Bannock women, and was at peace with them whom she had never injured; who beheld her unhappiness, but did not call it her shame. When she walked the paths across the common, her eyes were always on the skyward range of hills that appeared to her farther away than ever,--beyond a wider gulf, now that their tops were white, and the clouds came low enough to hide them. Often yellow gleams shot out beneath the clouds and turned the valleys green. It seemed to her that Henniker was there; he was in the cold, bright north, and the trumpets called her, but she could not go, for the way was very long. Such words as these she would sometimes whisper to her dark sisters by the camp-fire, and once they said to her, "Get strong and go; we will show you the way." * * * * *