high, smothered by the clouds; a fog slowly drifted from the river.

Meantime Hamilton and Helm had spent a part of the afternoon and
evening, as usual, at cards. Helm broke off the game and went to his
quarters rather early for him, leaving the Governor alone and in a bad
temper, because Farnsworth, when he had sent for him, could not be
found. Three times his orderly returned in as many hours with the same
report; the Captain had not been seen or heard of. Naturally this
sudden and complete disappearance, immediately after the reprimand,
suggested to Hamilton an unpleasant possibility. What if Farnsworth had
deserted him? Down deep in his heart he was conscious that the young
man had good cause for almost any desperate action. To lose Captain
Farnsworth, however, would be just now a calamity. The Indians were
drifting over rapidly to the side of the Americans, and every day
showed that the French could not long be kept quiet.

Hamilton sat for some time after Helm's departure, thinking over what
he now feared was a foolish mistake. Presently he buckled on Alice's
rapier, which he had lately been wearing as his own, and went out into
the main area of the stockade. A sentinel was tramping to and fro at
the gate, where a hazy lantern shone. The night was breathless and
silent. Hamilton approached the soldier on duty and asked him if he had
seen Captain Farnsworth, and receiving a negative reply, turned about
puzzled and thoughtful to walk back and forth in the chill, foggy air.

Presently a faint yellow light attracted his attention. It shone
through a porthole in an upper room of the block-house at the farther
angle of the stockade. In fact, Alice was reading by a sputtering lamp
a book Farnsworth had sent her, a volume of Ronsard that he had picked
up in Canada. Hamilton made his way in that direction, at first merely
curious to know who was burning oil so late; but after a few paces he
recognized where the light came from, and instantly suspected that
Captain Farnsworth was there. Indeed he felt sure of it. Somehow he
could not regard Alice as other than a saucy hoyden, incapable of
womanly virtue. His experience with the worst element of Canadian
French life and his peculiar cast of mind and character colored his
impression of her. He measured her by the women with whom the coureurs
de bois and half-breed trappers consorted in Detroit and at the posts
eastward to Quebec.

Alice, unable to sleep, had sought forge