She knew he could not be free till six.  She must not go up to the Ridge.  Last night, she had gone heedlessly.  She could never go so again.  Then, she realized why the Missionary’s wife had linked her fate with Williams’—­a frail bit of china putting itself to the coarse uses of earthenware—­washing, scrubbing, sandpapering three generations of morals and bodies to make an ideal real.  It was Wayland who had first described Mrs. Williams in that metaphor:  “a piece of Bisque or Dresden,” he had said, “and what those lousy Indians need is a wooden wash tub with lots of soft soap.”  Then, she wanted to see Mrs. Williams, to study her with this new knowledge.

A picket fence in imitation of a home in the East ran round the Mission House.  Pitiful attempts at gardening lined the gravel entrance, periwinkle dried up in the blazing Western sun, sickly scented geraniums that shrivelled to the night frost, altheas that did better but refused to bloom.  “They don’t transplant East to West, any better than they do West to East.  Better follow the Senator’s advice and domesticate our Western ones.”  Then, the whimsical thought came perhaps that was what her father had done with her.

The drone of a man’s voice from the Mission Parlor surprised her; for Mr. Williams had gone off with her father to the Upper Pass.

“Here is Miss Eleanor, herself!  We were just speaking about you, Eleanor!  This is an old friend of your father’s, Mr. Matthews from Saskatchewan!”

A little woman in gray drew Eleanor inside the Mission Parlor, a little woman with a white transparent skin trenched by lines of care, but somehow, when you looked twice, they were lines of beauty chiseled by time.  She was garbed in gray and her hair was almost white, but, from the first time Eleanor had looked at her hands, the girl wanted to kiss and cover them with her own—­they were such beautifully kept hands but so gnarled and misshapen with toil.  There had been only one child; but there were eighty Indian children in the Mission School.  Had the love dream paid toll for such toil—­Eleanor had asked herself when first she had seen the Missionary’s wife.  Now she knew that, whether the love dream paid toll or not, love would do and was doing the same thing time without end and everywhere.

Then, she became aware of the massive form of a man topped by an enormous head of white hair rising in links and hinges from a chair in the corner till his figure towered above the little woman.

“So this—­is Eleanor—­MacDonald?  Well, well, well!”

He was shaking hands at each word.  “A knew your grandfather well.  Many’s the time we have raced the dogtrains down MacKenzie River an’ the canoes down the Saskatchewan!  ’Twas your grandfather set the bagpipes skirling when Governor Simpson used to come galloping down the Columbia in the forties with his paddlers splitting the wind, a dark fearsome man, child, but a brave