Like his father, Maurice found no small difficulty in understanding and believing the story told to him.

That Mrs.Costello, calm, gentle, and just touched with a quiet stateliness, as he had always known her, could ever have been an impulsive, romantic girl, so swayed by passion or by flattery as to have left her father's house and all the protecting restraints of her English life to follow the fortunes of an Indian, was an idea so startling that he could not at once accept it for truth.

In Lucia the incongruity struck him less.

Her beauty, dark and magnificent, her fearless nature, her slender erect shape, her free and graceful movements--all the charms which he had by heart, suited an Indian origin.

He could readily imagine her the daughter of a chief and a hero.