“No, no,” she protested eagerly, “you came not from the East but from the West, the land across the sea that my mother came from in the ship that was wrecked.” And she withdrew one hand and pointed toward the wooded range beyond which lay the Pacific.
He shook his head. “No, there are white people in those lands too, but I never saw them. I came from the East,” he said, beginning to surmise that she must be an Asiatic. She drew away the hand that he still held in his, and her eyes filled with tears.
“I thought you were one of my mother’s people,” she murmured; and he felt that the pang of an exceeding disappointment was rilling her heart.
“Who are you?” he asked gently.
“The daughter of Multnomah.”
Cecil remembered now what he had heard of the dead white wife of Multnomah, and of her daughter, who, it was understood among the tribes, was to be given to Snoqualmie. He noticed, too, for the first time the trace of the Indian in her expression, as the light faded from it and it settled back into the despondent look habitual to it. All that was chivalrous in his nature went out to the fair young creature; all his being responded to the sting of her disappointment.
“I am not what you hoped I was, but your face is 163 like the face of the women of my own land. Shall we not be friends?”
She looked up wistfully at the handsome and noble countenance above her, so different from the stolid visages she had known so long.
“Yes; you are not Indian.”
In that one expression she unconsciously told Cecil how her sensitive nature shrank from the barbarism around her; how the tastes and aspirations she had inherited from her mother reached out for better and higher things.