“I’m sorry for them—I love them,” she murmured; “but oh, Bishop! I do so miss dear Mother and Father Waring!”
“I miss them, too,” the Bishop responded, with such delicate sympathy in his tones that she found the courage to go on.
“I miss my—my friends in Laurel, too, Bishop! I—I’m afraid I don’t know enough for the work either; and yet I do truly want to help.”
“Of course you do, my child,” responded the Bishop. “Why, the very name we gave you in baptism signifies a star—a light unto the Gentiles—a candle that shall be set upon a candle-stick to give light to all that are in the house. That is what we have always expected of you. And even the name the old women gave you when they saved you from the sad fate that overtook your father’s people—The-One-who-was-left-Alive! You must have been kept alive for some good purpose; always remember that, Stella. Have you ever thought that you might like to go back to the East for more training—perhaps for the training of a nurse?” he went on, the keen eyes searching her grave, downcast face.
Stella blushed more and more as it flashed upon her for the first time that the Bishop knew a good deal about the last six years of her life—had doubtless been in correspondence with Laurel friends.
“I—I think I would, Bishop; only not just yet. You see, I promised Blue Earth. And besides,” she went on, with desperate honesty, “the white people here seem to think I know too much already. They seem not to like me because I—I suppose I am different from the other Indian girls.”
A sudden sternness drove the smile from the Bishop’s face, and for a moment or two he was quite silent, while the sweet-toned bell in the church tower began its call to sunset prayer.
“We will talk of this again,” he said, very gently. “God bless you, my dear child!” And he was gone.
With blurred eyes and dizzy brain Stella blindly followed the throng of gayly dressed, yet most quiet and reverent worshipers, young men and maidens, old men and children, mothers with babes in arms, and took her place in the great circle upon the bare prairie sod. In the center of the ring the Bishop and his ministers, many of whom showed earnest dark faces above the snowy surplices, read the prayers of the church and gave utterance to the Christian hymns that rose in a great wave of devotion to the skies. The soft syllables of her native Dakota tongue seemed to fit the dear, familiar words, and no one who looked upon that scene could ever have guessed that only eighteen years before those tawny hills had been black with armed men, and that peaceful plain strewed with the tortured forms of the dead and dying.