They were standing in the studio, into which she had allowed him to come from the stifling darkness of the inner room, on the ground that the rain protected them against intrusion from outside.  During their conversation she had been placing the easel and arranging the work which formed her pretext for being there, while Micmac, stretched on the floor, with his head between his paws, kept a half-sleepy eye on both of them.

“Your father was a Canadian, then?” he ventured to ask, as she seated herself with a palette in her hand.

“He was a Virginian.  My mother was the wife of a French-Canadian voyageur.  I believe she had a strain of Indian blood.  The voyageurs and their families generally have.”

Having recovered her self-possession, she made her statements in the matter-of-fact tone she used to hide embarrassment flicking a little color into the sketch before her as she spoke.  Ford seated himself at a distance, gazing at her with a kind of fascination.  Here, then, was the clew to that something untamed which persisted through all the effects of training and education, as a wild flavor will last in a carefully cultivated fruit.  His curiosity about her was so intense that, notwithstanding the difficulty with which she stated her facts, it overcame his prompting to spare her.

“And yet,” he said, after a long pause, in which he seemed to be assimilating the information she had given him—­“and yet I don’t see how that explains you.”

“I suppose it doesn’t—­not any more than your situation explains you.”

“My situation explains me perfectly, because I’m the victim of a wrong.”

“Well, so am I—­in another way.  I’m made to suffer because I’m the daughter of my parents.”

“That’s a rotten shame,” he exclaimed, in boyish sympathy “It isn’t your fault.”

“Of course it isn’t,” she smiled, wistfully.  “And yet I’d rather suffer with the parents I have than be happy with any others.”

“I suppose that’s natural,” he admitted, doubtfully.

“I wish I knew more about them,” she went on, continuing to give light touches to the work before her, and now and then leaning back to get the effect.  “I never understood why my father was in prison in Canada.”

“Perhaps it was when he killed the man,” Ford suggested.

“No; that was in Virginia—­at least, the first one.  His people didn’t like it.  That was the reason for his leaving home.  He hated a settled life; and so he wandered away into the northwest of Canada.  It was in the days when they first began to build the railways there—­when there were almost no people except the trappers and the voyageurs.  I was born on the very shores of Hudson Bay.”

“But you didn’t stay there?”

“No.  I was only a very little child—­not old enough to remember—­when my father sent me down to Quebec, to the Ursuline nuns.  He never saw me again.  I lived with them till four years ago.  I’m eighteen now.”