"And your aim is to defeat them?"
"I can't talk any more now," she said, reverting to an explanatory tone of voice. "I must go. I've arranged everything for you for the day. If you are very quiet you can sit in the studio and read; but you mustn't look out at the window, or even draw back the curtain. If you hear a step outside, you must creep in here and shut the door. And you needn't be impatient; because I'm going to spend the day working out a plan for your escape."
But when she appeared next morning she declined to give details of the plan she had in mind. She preferred to work it out alone, she said, and give him the outlines only when she had settled them. It chanced to be a day of drenching summer rain, and Ford, with a renewed effort to get some clew to her identity, expressed his surprise that she should have been allowed to venture out.
"Oh, no one worries about what I do," she said, indifferently "I go about as I choose."
"So much the better for me," he laughed. "That's how you came to be wandering on old Wayne's terrace, just in the nick of time. What stumps me is the promptness with which you thought of stowing me away."
"It wasn't promptness, exactly. As a matter of fact, I had worked the whole thing out beforehand."
His eyebrows went up incredulously. "For me?"
"No, not for you; for anybody. Ever since my guardian allowed me to build the studio—last year—I've imagined how easy it would be for some—some hunted person to stay hidden here, almost indefinitely. I've tried to fancy it, when I've had nothing better to do."
"You don't seem to have had anything better to do very often," he observed, glancing about the cabin.
"If you mean that I haven't painted much, that's quite true. I thought I couldn't do without a studio—till I got one. But when I've come here, I'm afraid it's generally been to—to indulge in day-dreams."
"Day-dreams of helping prisoners to escape. It wouldn't be every girl's fancy, but it's not for me to complain of that."
"My father would have wanted me to do it," she declared, as if in self-justification. "A woman once helped him to get out of prison."
"Good for her! Who was she?"
Having asked the question lightly, in a boyish impulse to talk, he was surprised to see her show signs of embarrassment.
"She was my mother," she said, after an interval in which she seemed to be making up her mind to give the information.
In the manifest difficulty she had in speaking, Ford sprang to her aid.
"That's like the old story of Gilbert à Becket—Thomas à Becket's father, you know."
The historical reference was received in silence, as she bent over the small task she had in hand.
"He married the woman who helped him out of prison," Ford went on, for her enlightenment.
She raised her head and faced him.
"It wasn't like the story of Gilbert à Becket," she said, quietly.
It took some seconds of Ford's slow thinking to puzzle out the meaning of this. Even then he might have pondered in vain had it not been for the flush that gradually over-spread her features, and brought what he called the wild glint into her eyes. When he understood, he reddened in his own turn, making matters worse.
"I beg your pardon," he stammered. "I never thought—"
"You needn't beg my pardon," she interrupted, speaking with a catch in her breath. "I wanted you to know. … You've asked me so many questions that it seemed as if I was ashamed of my father and mother when I didn't answer. … I'm not ashamed of them. … I'd rather you knew. … Every one does—who knows me."
Half unconsciously he glanced up at the framed sketches on the chimney-piece. Her eyes followed him, and she spoke instantly:
"You're quite right. I meant that—for them."
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."
"Why didn't he send you to his people? Hadn't he sisters?—or anything like that."
"He tried to, but they wouldn't have anything to do with me."
It was clearly a relief to her to talk about herself. He guessed that she rarely had an opportunity of opening her heart to any one. Not till this morning had he seen her in the full light of day; and, though but an immature judge, he fancied her features had settled themselves into lines of reserve and pride from which in happier circumstances they might have been free. Her way of twisting her dark hair—which waved over the brows from a central parting—into the simplest kind of knot gave her an air of sedateness beyond her years. But what he noticed in her particularly was her eyes—not so much because they were wild, dark eyes, with the peculiar fleeing expression of startled forest things, as because of the pleading, apologetic look that comes into the eyes of forest things when they stand at bay. It was when—for seconds only—the pupils shone with a jet-like blaze that he caught what he called the non-Aryan effect; but that