"My beloved," he said, "those whom you see around us are of your race, and we have sworn but now eternal peace with them--a peace that must never more be broken. Yet to ensure that peace we have granted one request to the pale faces; we have consented that, if those who dwell with us, yet are of their land, desire to leave us and go back with them, they are free to do so. Do you desire thus to return?" "To return!" she said, looking first with amazement at him and then at us, "to return and leave you? Oh! Anuza, Anuza! My heart's dearest love!" while, as she spoke, she embraced the knee against which she reclined. "You see," he said to us, "you see. And as it is with her so will it be with the others. Yet make your demand if you will." Alas! all was in vain. In vain that Joice and Miss Mills pleaded with them as women sometimes can plead with their sisters for their good--what could they hope to effect? If they implored them to return to their own people they were answered that they could not leave their husbands, for so they spoke of the chiefs to whom they were allied. If they asked them to return to Christianity the reply was that their husbands' faith was their faith. It was hopeless, and soon we knew it to be so. The lives they led now were the only lives they had any knowledge of--their earlier ones at home, amongst their own people, were forgotten if they had ever understood them; their very parents, they told us, were but the shadow of a memory. "Why, therefore," asked the fairest complexioned of them all, she who was the squaw of the Bear and the mother of his child, "should we go back to those we know not of, even though they be still alive? Will your faith, which preaches that a woman shall leave all to cleave unto her husband, ask me to leave mine and my child and go back to I know not what?" "In truth," I heard one old colonist whisper to O'Rourke, who stood by his side, "there would be none for her to go back to. I do think she is the child of Martin Peake, who was stolen when a babe, and, if so, her father has been long since dead. Her mother lived until a year ago hoping ever that she might return, looking up the lane that led to the woods with wistful eyes, as though she might perhaps see her coming back at last; even keeping her little room ready against her coming. Yet it was never to be, and she died with her longing ungratified," and the man dashed his rough hand across his eyes as he spoke, while I saw that those of the old adventurer also filled with tears as he listened. Then he said softly: "I can understand. I once had a daughter whom I loved dearly and--and she is dead and gone from me. Yet better so, far better than to be like this."