It was very evident that he now saw, for the first time, one of
those females, of whom the fathers of his tribe so often spoke, and
who were considered of such rare excellence as to equal all that
savage ingenuity could imagine in the way of loveliness. His
observation of Ellen was less marked, but notwithstanding the warlike
and chastened expression of his eye, there was much of the homage,
which man is made to pay to woman, even in the more cursory look he
sometimes turned on her maturer and perhaps more animated beauty. This
admiration, however, was so tempered by his habits, and so smothered
in the pride of a warrior, as completely to elude every eye but that
of the trapper, who was too well skilled in Indian customs, and was
too well instructed in the importance of rightly conceiving, the
character of the stranger, to let the smallest trait, or the most
trifling of his movements, escape him. In the mean time, the
unconscious Ellen herself moved about the feeble and less resolute
Inez, with her accustomed assiduity and tenderness, exhibiting in her
frank features those changing emotions of joy and regret which
occasionally beset her, as her active mind dwelt on the decided step
she had just taken, with the contending doubts and hopes, and possibly
with some of the mental vacillation, that was natural to her situation
and sex.
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