The storm had
suddenly ceased, and a glimmer of sunset light was breaking over the
distant wastes of snow.
"You want to pay a debt you think you owe," she said, in a strange,
lustreless voice, turning to him at last. "Well, you have paid it. You
have given me a book to read which I will keep always. And I give you a
receipt in full for your debt."
"I don't know about any book," he answered dazedly. "I want to marry you
right away."
"I am sorry, but it is not necessary," she replied suggestively.
Her face was very pale now.
"But I want to. It ain't a debt. That was only a way of putting it.
I want to make you my wife. I got some position, and I can make the West
sit up, and look at you and be glad."
Suddenly her anger flared out, low and vivid and fierce, but her words
were slow and measured. "There is no reason why I should marry you--not
one. You offer me marriage as a prince might give a penny to a beggar.
If my mother were not an Indian woman, you would not have taken it all
as a matter of course. But my father was a white man, and I am a white
man's daughter, and I would rather marry an Indian, who would think me
the best thing there was in the light of the sun, than marry you.
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