“Not very busy,” said Tannis, with her terrible directness.  “It is not that.  It is because you are going to Prince Albert to see a white woman!”

Even in his embarrassment Carey noted that this was the first time he had ever heard Tannis use the expression, “a white woman,” or any other that would indicate her sense of a difference between herself and the dominant race.  He understood, at the same moment, that this girl was not to be trifled with—­that she would have the truth out of him, first or last.  But he felt indescribably foolish.

“I suppose so,” he answered lamely.

“And what about me?” asked Tannis.

When you come to think of it, this was an embarrassing question, especially for Carey, who had believed that Tannis understood the game, and played it for its own sake, as he did.

“I don’t understand you, Tannis,” he said hurriedly.

“You have made me love you,” said Tannis.

The words sound flat enough on paper.  They did not sound flat to Tom, as repeated by Lazarre, and they sounded anything but flat to Carey, hurled at him as they were by a woman trembling with all the passions of her savage ancestry.  Tannis had justified her criticism of poetry.  She had said her half-dozen words, instinct with all the despair and pain and wild appeal that all the poetry in the world had ever expressed.

They made Carey feel like a scoundrel.  All at once he realized how impossible it would be to explain matters to Tannis, and that he would make a still bigger fool of himself, if he tried.

“I am very sorry,” he stammered, like a whipped schoolboy.

“It is no matter,” interrupted Tannis violently.  “What difference does it make about me—­a half-breed girl?  We breed girls are only born to amuse the white men.  That is so—­is it not?  Then, when they are tired of us, they push us aside and go back to their own kind.  Oh, it is very well.  But I will not forget—­my father and brother will not forget.  They will make you sorry to some purpose!”

She turned, and stalked away to her canoe.  He waited under the pines until she crossed the river; then he, too, went miserably home.  What a mess he had contrived to make of things!  Poor Tannis!  How handsome she had looked in her fury—­and how much like a squaw!  The racial marks always come out plainly under the stress of emotion, as Tom noted later.

Her threat did not disturb him.  If young Paul and old Auguste made things unpleasant for him, he thought himself more than a match for them.  It was the thought of the suffering he had brought upon Tannis that worried him.  He had not, to be sure, been a villain; but he had been a fool, and that is almost as bad, under some circumstances.