With trembling I looked out for Saul’s return.  Here, upon the banks of the Neosho, I had learned the secret which my life in the East had hidden so long.

A certain kind, of guiltiness came over me, as Saul drew near, breaking down with every tread the sun-cured grass,—­a sense of unworthiness, to hold in my hand a possession which essentially was his, and which he had not freely given me.

“I will not look into his eyes with a veil lying in the air,” I said, very quietly to myself; and so, when my husband saw the burning of the little lamp and asked the cause, I told him all the story of the Indian woman, and put into his hand her gift to me.  Saul’s mind was preoccupied; he paid very little attention to the story; but when I gave him the white-furred scroll, and he opened it, then the grave professor——­Well, it is better that I do not put into words what followed, even here, on the Big Blue.

An hour afterwards Saul spoke.  He said,—­

“Lucy, you have given me the key of my life, I knew my Indian blood, but I knew not whence it came; therefore I said nothing to you.  I remember being tormented by it, when a boy, but never knew by what right.  Let me translate for you this Indian register of—­let me see—­my grandmother’s marriage.  ’Ten moons from the lost moon, and many sleeps from the life of the big Huron Water, the Great Spirit called Luella to walk with a son of the Pale-Faces.  The mystery [the priest] met them, and told them to go on to the Sun.  They are gone in the path of the lost moons.’”

“Let us go to Skylight by the way of Montreal,” I suggested.

Saul said, “It is well.”

At the Missouri I laid aside my prairie costume, and assumed the raiment of fashion.

We found in Canada pleasant people bearing our name, and they welcomed us as relatives.

Richard Monten lay beside a fixed cloud of marble; and although Luella’s sister had said she died far away, yet her name was beneath her husband’s.

Tradition told us of the beautiful Indian wife with eyes like light,—­and how her husband took her, every year, alone with him into the wilds,—­and how, when they came back, and the winter snows fell, she would sit all day beside him, with her eyes on figures and letters, whilst her impatient fingers were threading her long hair, and memory shook her head at the attempted education, perhaps wisely and well.

When Mr. Monten died, and left her houses and lands, she turned away from them all, and, leading her boy by the hand, went out of her home and was seen no more until long after, when Father Kino, a kind old priest, going home late one night from a dying soul, in passing the cloud of marble, heard faint moans coming out of it, and, going near, found an Indian woman, in festive dress, like a chief’s daughter, kneeling there.  A few minutes afterwards, when Father Kino came back with an assistant, there were no more moans, for Luella had “gone on to the Sun.”