"Oh, little one! It seemed as if thou wert gone forever!"
Jeanne hugged her foster mother in a transport of joy and affection. What if Pani had not cared for her all these years? There were some orphan children in the town bound out for servants. To be sure, there had been M. Bellestre.
Pani did not receive the Sieur Angelot very graciously. Jeanne tried to explain the wonderful things that had happened, but Pani's age and her limited understanding made it a hard task. "Thy mother was dead long ago," she kept saying. "And they will take thee away, little one—"
"Then they will take you, too, Pani; I shall never leave you. I love you. For years there was no one else to love. And how could I be ungrateful?"
She looked so charming in her eagerness that her father bent over and kissed her. If her mother had been thus faithful!
"I shall never leave Detroit, little one. You may take up a sapling and transplant it, but the old tree, never! It dies. The new soil is strange, unfriendly."
"Do not tease her," said her father in a low tone. "It is all strange to her, and she does not understand. Try to get her to tell her story of the night you came."
At first Pani was very wary with true Indian suspicion. The Sieur Angelot had much experience with these children of the forests and wilderness. He understood their limited power of expansion, their suspicions of anything outside of their own knowledge. But he led her on skillfully, and his voice had the rare quality of persuasion, of inducing confidence. In her French patois, with now and then an Indian word, she began to live over those early years with the unstudied eloquence of real love.
"Touchas is dead," interposed Jeanne. "But there is Wenonah, and, oh, there is all the country outside, the pretty farms, the houses that are not so crowded. In the spring many of them are whitewashed, and the trees are in bloom, and the roses everywhere, and the birds singing—"
She paused suddenly and flushed, remembering the lovely island home with all its beauty.