In the morning my spirit is light, and I have harvest where I would gather, and the stubble is for my foes. In the evening my limbs are heavy, and I am at rest in my blanket. The hunt is mine and sleep is mine, and my soul is cheerful when I remember thee. Thou art here. I have built for thee a place where thy spirit comes. I hear thee when thou callest to me, and I kneel outside the door, for thou art wise, and thou speakest to me; but thee as thou art in a far land I shall see no more. This is my word to thee, that thou mayst know that I am not alone. Thou shalt not come again, as thou once went; it is not meet. But by these other ways I will speak to thee. Thou art here. Farewell. I have spoken. Lali finished reading, and then slowly folded up the letter. The writing was that of the wife of the factor at Fort Charles--she knew it. She sat for a minute looking straight before her. She read her father’s allegory. Barbarian in so much as her father was, he had beaten this thing out with the hammer of wisdom. He missed her, but she must not come back; she had outgrown the old life--he knew it and she was with him in spirit, in his memory; she understood his picturesque phrases, borrowed from the large, affluent world about him. Something of the righteousness and magnanimity of this letter passed into her, giving her for an instant a sort of peace. She had needed it--needed it to justify herself, and she had been justified. To return was impossible--she had known that all along, though she had not admitted it; the struggle had been but a kind of remorse, after all. That her father should come to her was also impossible--it was neither for her happiness nor his. She had been two different persons in her life, and the first was only a memory to the second. The father had solved the problem for her. He too was now a memory that she could think on with pleasure, as associated with the girl she once was. He had been well provided for by her husband, and General Armour put his hand on hers gently and said: “Lali, without your permission I have read this other letter.” She did not appear curious. She was thinking still of her father’s letter to her. She nodded abstractedly. “Lali,” he continued, “this says that your father wished that letter to be written to you just as he said it at the Fort, on the day of the Feast of the Yellow Swan. He stood up--the factor writes so here--and said that he had been thinking much for years, and that the time had come when he must speak to his daughter over the seas--” General Armour paused. Lali inclined her head, smiled wistfully, and held up the letter for him to see. The general continued: