“Not unless you sang it so,” he answered gallantly, and with a kind of earnestness.
“You have not forgotten the way of London men,” she rejoined.
“Perhaps that is well, for I do not know the way of women,” he said, with a faint bitterness. “Yet, I don’t speak unadvisedly in this,”—here he meant to be a little bold and bring the talk to the past,—“for I heard you sing that song once before.”
She turned on him half puzzled, a little nervous. “Where did you hear me sing it?”
He had made up his mind, wisely enough, to speak with much openness and some tact also, if possible. “It was on the Glow Worm River at the Clip Claw Hills. I came into your father’s camp one evening in the autumn, hungry and tired and knocked about. I was given the next tent to yours. It was night, and just before I turned in I heard your voice singing. I couldn’t understand much of the language, but I had the sense of it, and I know it when I hear it again.”
“Yes, I remember singing it that night,” she said. “Next day was the Feast of the Yellow Swan.”
Her eyes presently became dreamy, and her face took on a distant, rapt look. She sat looking straight before her for a moment.
He did not speak, for he interpreted the look aright, and he was going to be patient, to wait.
“Tell me of my father,” she said. “You have been kind to him?”
He winced a little. “When I left Fort Charles he was very well,” he said, “and he asked me to tell you to come some day. He also has sent you a half-dozen silver-fox skins, a sash, and moccasins made by his own hands. The things are not yet unpacked.”