If I called her Madame de Ferrier instead of my Cloud-Mother, a strained and puzzled look replaced her usual satisfaction.  I did not often use the name, nor did I try to make her repeat my own.  It was my daily effort to fall in with her happiness, for if she saw any anxiety she was quick to plead: 

“Don’t you like me any more, Paul?  Are you tired of me, because I am a Cloud-Mother?”

“No,” I would answer.  “Lazarre will never be tired of you.”

“Do you think I am growing smaller?  Will you love me if I shrink to a baby?”

“I will love you.”

“I used to love you when you were so tiny, Paul, before you knew how to love me back.  If I forget how”—­she clutched the lapels of my coat—­“will you leave me then?”

“Eagle, say this:  ‘Lazarre cannot leave me.’”

“Lazarre cannot leave me.”

I heard her repeating this at her sewing.  She boasted to Marie Grignon—­“Lazarre cannot leave me!—­Paul taught me that.”

My Cloud-Mother asked me to tell her the stories she used to tell me.  She had forgotten them.

“I am the child now,” she would say.  “Tell me the stories.”

I repeated mythical tribe legends, gathered from Skenedonk on our long rides, making them as eloquent as I could.  She listened, holding her breath, or sighing with contentment.

If any one in the household smiled when she led me about by the hand, there was a tear behind the smile.

She kept herself in perfection, bestowing unceasing care upon her dress, which was always gray.

“I have to wear gray; I am in a cloud,” she had said to the family.

“We have used fine gray stuff brought from Holland, and wools that Mother Ursule got from Montreal,” Katarina told me.  “The Pawnees dye with vegetable colors.  But they cannot make the pale gray she loves.”

Eagle watched me with maternal care.  If a hair dropped on my collar she brushed it away, and smoothed and settled my cravat.  The touch of my Cloud-Mother, familiar and tender, like the touch of a wife, charged through me with torture, because she was herself so unconscious of it.

Before I had been in the house a week she made a little pair of trousers a span long, and gave them to me.  Marie and Katarina turned their faces to laugh.  My Cloud-Mother held the garment up for their inspection, and was not at all sensitive to the giggles it provoked.

“I made over an old pair of his father’s,” she said.

The discarded breeches used by the pouched turkey had been devoted to her whim.  Every stitch was neatly set.  I praised her beautiful needlework, and she said she would make me a coat.

Skenedonk was not often in the house.  He took to the winter hunting and snow-shoeing with vigor.  Whenever he came indoors I used to see him watching Madame de Ferrier with saturnine wistfulness.  She paid no attention to him.  He would stand gazing at her while she sewed; being privileged as an educated Indian and my attendant, to enter the family room where the Pawnees came only to serve.  They had the ample kitchen and its log fire to themselves.  I wondered what was working in Skenedonk’s mind, and if he repented calling one so buffeted, a sorceress.