"May I be told the reason of this breaking away from all you held dear? You said I was a comrade, and, believe me, no man ever had a truer. Was it a——"
"A woman? Of course it was a woman. When is man's life eternally blessed or cursed except by a woman? When is he hindered, injured, ruined, and undone by any event that has not a woman in it?"
"And she was beautiful, clever, high-born?"
"All that and more; I had never met with her equal. She was an acknowledged queen of society. She had but one fault."
"She did not love you?" said the girl, hastily, while her tones vibrated with suppressed excitement.
"Not sufficiently to link her fate with mine for the journey from which there is no retreat. She admitted approval, liking, respect—words by which women disguise indifference; but she believed that she had a mission in life, a call from heaven to go forth to the poor and afflicted, to elevate the race—a sacred task, for which marriage would unfit her."
"You pakehas are strange people," she said musingly. "And so she would not be happy because she desired to teach, to help the poor, the common people! And if she failed?"
"She would have wasted her own life, and ruined that of another."
"Life is often like that, so the books say—even the Bible. 'Vanity of vanities!' Either people do not get what they want, or find that it is not what they hoped for. Yet I suppose some people are happy—generally those who know the least. Listen to that girl singing. She is, if any one ever was."
They had been descending the hill, when at an angle of the narrow path they came upon a young native woman, sitting at the door of a cottage which bore traces of European construction. A child stood at her knee, while she was busied about her simple task of needlework. The midday sun had warmed, not oppressed, the atmosphere, and there was an air of sensuous, natural enjoyment about her air and appearance as she looked over the river meadows where the tribe was employed. Her face lighted up with a smile of recognition as she saw Erena and her companion.