In a little while they were seated on a grassy bank in the shade of the trees, talking together. She bade him tell her of his people. She listened intently; the bright, beautiful look came back as she heard the tale.
“They are kind to women, instead of making them mere burden-bearers; they have pleasant homes; they dwell in cities? Then they are like my mother’s people.”
“They are gentle, kind, humane. They have all the arts that light up life and make it beautiful,—not like the tribes of this grim, bloodstained land.”
“This land!” Her face darkened and she lifted her hand in a quick, repelling gesture. “This land is a grave. The clouds lie black and heavy on the spirit that longs for the sunlight and cannot reach it.” She turned to him again. “Go on, your words are music.”
He continued, and she listened till the story of his country and his wanderings was done. When he ended, she drew a glad, deep breath; her eyes were sparkling with joy.
“I am content,” she said, in a voice in which there 164 was a deep heart-thrill of happiness. “Since my mother died I have been alone, all alone; and I longed, oh so often, for some one who talked and felt as she did to come to me, and now you have come. I sat cold and shivering in the night a long time, but the light and warmth have come at last. Truly, Allah is good!”
“Allah!”
“Yes; he was my mother’s God, as the Great Spirit is my father’s.”
“They are both names for the same All Father,” replied Cecil. “They mean the same thing, even as the sun is called by many names by many tribes, yet there is but the one sun.”
“Then I am glad. It is good to learn that both prayed to the one God, though they did not know it. But my mother taught me to use the name of Allah, and not the other. And while my father and the tribes call me by my Indian name, ‘Wallulah,’ she gave me another, a secret name, that I was never to forget.”