Seeing this, Loseis became angrier still. “There you go! Of course you’re good! That’s what makes me mad! Because I’m not good at all! I’ve got the temper of a fiend! Well, do you suppose I enjoy losing it? . . . I know I ought to say I’m sorry now, but it sticks in my throat!”
“I not want that,” murmured Mary-Lou. “I am lovin’ you anyway.”
“Well . . . I love you, too,” grumbled Loseis, shamefaced as a boy. “But I wish you weren’t so humble. It’s bad for me. This is Blackburn’s Post on Blackburn’s River; all this is Blackburn’s country, and I’m Blackburn’s daughter. There is nobody to stand up to me. I am too young to be the mistress. I don’t know anything. . . . That white man laughed at me as one laughs at a child!”
Loseis had stopped her pacing. Her head hung down. “I ought to have a white woman to tell me things,” she said wistfully. “In all my life I have seen but one woman of my own kind. That was the governess my father brought in for me. I used to mock her. But now I wish I had her back. She had nice manners. . . . He laughed at me. . . .”
She strayed to the second little crooked window, which was at the end of the room furthest from the fireplace. It overlooked a natural meadow below, where the tepees of the Slavis were built upon both sides of a creek which emptied into the main stream just beyond. In front of the Post the main river described a great convex bend, so that Loseis could look both up-stream and down. This bend was formed by a bold promontory of a hill which forced the river to go around its base. The point of this hill had been sliced off by the water, leaving a precipitous yellow cut-bank facing the Post. On the summit, startlingly conspicuous against a group of dark pine trees, was a fence of white palings enclosing a tiny plot with a cross rising out of it. By day and by night too, that grave dominated the Post.
“Ah! if only my mother had lived!” sighed Loseis.
“Let me read the book again,” suggested Mary-Lou, to divert her mind.
Loseis shook her head impatiently. She came away from the window. “I am not in the humor for it. I guess it is too fine for me. . . .” She resumed her uneven pacing. “Mary-Lou,” she suddenly cried in a voice full of pain, “when a man and a woman love I am sure they do not think such elegant thoughts as are in that book. Ah! the heart burns a hole in your breast! It is impossible to think at all!”
The red girl’s eyes followed her, full of compassion.
Observing that look, Loseis said sharply: “You must not think I am in love with that white man, Conacher. Oh, no! I was just imagining. I am far from loving him. I hate him!”