“No—­I mean a woman!  Now, Rebecca, will you sit down till I tell you all about it?”

“Sir,” interjects the young gentleman of the cloth, “I protest there are things that a maid ought not to hear!”

“Then, sir, have a care that you say none of them under cloak of religion! Honi soit qui mal y pense!  The mind that thinketh no evil taketh no evil.”

Then I turned to Rebecca, standing with a startled look in her eyes.

“Rebecca, Madame Radisson has told you how Jack was left to be tortured by the Indians?”

“Hortense has told me.”

“And how he risked his life to save an Indian girl’s life?”

“Yes,” says Rebecca, with downcast lids.

“That Indian girl came and untied Jack’s bonds the night of the massacre.  They escaped together.  When he went snow-blind, Mizza hunted and snared for him and kept him.  Her people were all dead; she could not go back to her tribe—­if Jack had left her in the north, the hostiles would have killed her.  Jack brought her home with him——­”

“He ought to have put her in a house of correction,” snapped Rebecca.

“Rebecca!  Why would he put her in a house of correction?  What had she done that she ought not to have done?  She had saved his life.  He had saved hers, and he married her.”

“There was no minister,” said Rebecca, with a tightening of her childish dimpled mouth and a reddening of her cheeks and a little indignant toss of the chin.

“Rebecca!  How could they get a minister a thousand leagues away from any church?  They will get one now——­”

Rebecca rose stiffly, her little lily face all aflame.

“My father saith much evil cometh of this—­it is sin—­he ought not to have married her; and—­and—­it is very wrong of you to be telling me this—­” she stammered angrily, with her little hands clasped tight across the white stomacher.

“Very unfit,” comes from that young gentleman of the cloth.

We were all three standing, and I make no doubt my own face went as red as theirs, for the taunt bit home.  That inference of evil where no evil was, made an angrier man than was my wont.  The two moved towards the door.  I put myself across their way.

“Rebecca, you do yourself wrong!  You are measuring other people’s deeds with too short a yardstick, little woman, and the wrong is in your own mind, not theirs.”

“I—­I—­don’t know what you mean!” cried Rebecca obstinately, with a break in her voice that ought to have warned; but her next words provoked afresh.  “It was wicked!—­it was sinful!”—­with an angry stamp—­“it was shameful of Jack Battle to marry an Indian girl——­”

There I cut in.

“Was it?” I asked.  “Young woman, let me tell you a bald truth!  When a white man marries an Indian, the union is as honourable as your own would be.  It is when the white man does not marry the Indian that there is shame; and the shame is to the white man, not the Indian——!”