"Ay," he encouraged, impatient at her faltering.
"As though they were not my kind."
"Not your kind?" he demanded slowly. "Then what is your kind?"
"I do not know, I ..." She shook her head in a bewildered manner. "I cannot put into words the way I felt. It was strangeness in me. I was unlike other maidens, who sought the young men slyly. I could not care for the young men that way. It would have been a great wrong, it seemed, and an ill deed."
"What is the first thing you remember?" Canim asked with abrupt irrelevance.
"Pow-Wah-Kaan, my mother."
"And naught else before Pow-Wah-Kaan?"
"Naught else."
But Canim, holding her eyes with his, searched her secret soul and saw it waver.
"Think, and think hard, Li Wan!" he threatened.