beloved cousin," Prince Rupert, the gentlemen "aci venturers of England trading into Hudson's Bay "had married the daughters of chiefs, effecting state alliances to facilitate peace, good-will, and commerce. From these had sprung the type to which Margaret belonged, fair, dark-eyed women, combining the manners and mind of the whites with the daring and pride of the Indian. Such had been Madame McLoughlin's early history.
"How can I know that your father not stiff at the bottom of Lake Superior?" continued the Madame to-day, half to Eloise and half to herself. "He capsize there once, and all but him were lost. Oh, that lake is cold! it quickly numb and drag the swimmer down! I saw them when they brought him through the fort gate like dead man. He had beautiful golden hair, the Indian call it sunshine; but after that it turn white white as snow. Before he was thirty, Louice, men call your father old."
That incident was when Chief Factor Mackenzie was lost and McLoughlin lived to rule Fort William. Eloise had heard talk of the fogs and storms and flurries of the great Canadian sea; she had heard talk of life at Fort William, the metropolitan post of the Northwest Company on Lake Superior, where the merchants of Montreal used to come in summer like kings on a royal progress. She was a baby then. She could barely remember the journey to the Columbia; one long picnic it was to Eloise and to David her brother, who laughed and crowed and kicked his pink heels in his birch-canoe cradle. He, too, was coming home now with his father; coming from five years' study in Paris and London.
"A penny for your thoughts, Eloise! "
