She resumed her knitting, the spinning wheel whirred again, the room grew darker--would have been quite dark except for a flickering light from the pine knot on the hearth. Granny’s voice came presently out of the shadows, with a dreamy quality unusual to its brisk accents: “That smell of burning pinewood always makes me think of the forest, and of our first little cabin there in the clearing, mine and Dan’l’s. A happy time----” The girl at the spinning wheel lifted her head with a sharp movement, as of pain, which was not lost on the old eyes watching her. “Tell me, dearie--I’ve often wanted to ask: were they so terribly cruel to you, those ugly savages?” Granny asked quietly. “They were not all cruel,” the girl said. “Nor ugly.” “No?” repeated the other, encouraged. “Not the women, perhaps? One of them would have mothered you, I dessay? Surely even red savage women would want to protect a poor little motherless thing like you, just coming into womanhood? And--and save her from the wickedness of the men?” “The men,” said Polly, “were not all wicked.” Granny winced. But she spoke again, very gently, “Sometimes cruelty from men is--is better than too much kindness. Eh, Polly, my girl?” There was no answer. The spinning wheel whirred unevenly. Granny sighed. “Of course you needn’t talk to me unless you’ve a mind to. Only, remember, if you’ve got something to forget, that ain’t the way to do it, keeping it all to yourself; that ain’t the way to do it!” After a pause she spoke again, haltingly: “Sometimes I’ve thought--maybe it’s because I’m old, getting into my dotage--but I’ve thought there might be things you _didn’t want to forget_! I know how it takes ahold of men, that wild, free life. It sort of spoils ’em for houses and folks and duties, and such as that. They keep wanderin’ off, further and further off, till some day they don’t never come back. My Dan’l, your own grandfather, was like that. But women are different, Polly. They’ve got to be! They’ve got to mind the house, and see that the fire don’t go out; see that the courage don’t go out in their men folk, either, because it takes more than tinder to light that again. Else there soon wouldn’t be any homes to mind, all of us wanderin’ round loose in herds, like the wild beasts. Sometimes, since we got you back, Polly, I’ve been scared you might have inherited a sort of hankerin’ for the wilderness, from your grandfather, dearie----” The girl had stopped spinning. She slipped over to the cradle and crouched beside it, whispering in a sort of moan, “_Nenemoosha, Nenemoosha----_” “Ah, was he stirring in his sleep, and his deaf old Granny never heard? Takes a mother’s ear for that! But you oughtn’t to talk to him in that outlandish tongue, I declare you oughtn’t. ‘_Nenemoosha_’--what a name for a boy that’s just been christened a good, sound Bible ‘John’! Whatever does it mean?” “It means ‘Beloved,’” answered the girl, very low.