dy's hair always in such trim-wise, and you and Fifine like people of
fashion."

Odalie could but laugh in truth; she had known such splendors as
colonial life at that day could present and she was well aware how the
ill-equipped wife of a pioneer on the furthest frontier failed of that
choice aspect.

"I thought," she said, still laughing, "that you were ambitious of the
fashion of such coiffure as Mr. Gilfillan affects--oh, poor man!--and
had made up your mind to plait your hair no more."

Hamish took this very ill, and in dudgeon would not divulge the name and
quality of the fair maiden the sight of whom had so gone to his head.
But it was the next evening only that they were to attend a ball in the
officers' mess-hall at the fort, in celebration of the joys of
Christmastide, and Odalie perceived the rancor of resentment gradually
departing when he came and begged--not her pardon--but that she would
do him the infinite favor to plait his hair. Try as he would, and he had
tried for an hour, he could not achieve a coiffure that seemed
satisfactory to him in the solicitous state of his feelings. This
ceremony she performed, perched upon what she called a _tabouret_, which
was nothing but a stout, square billet of wood with a cover and valance
of a dull blue fustian, while he sat at her feet, and Sandy looked on
with outward gravity, but with a twinkle in his sober eyes that made
Hamish's blood boil to realize that she had told his brother of the
sudden reason for a change of heart touching the mode of wearing his
hair, and that they had quietly laughed at him about it. Nevertheless,
now he valued every strand of it as if it were spun gold, and would have
parted with it as hardly.

The Christmas ball was indeed an affair of much splendor. Profuse
wreaths of holly, with berries all aflame, decorated the walls of the
great hall, and among them the lines of buffalo horns and the antlers of
deer and the waving banners showed with enhanced effect. From the centre
of the ceiling the mystic mistletoe depended with such suggestively
wide-spreading boughs that it might seem that no fair guest could hope
to escape the penalty; this was the broad jest of the masculine
entertainers. The hosts, all the commissioned officers being present,
were in full uniform, seeming brilliant against the decorated walls and
in the great flare of the fire; even lace ruffles were to be seen and
many a queue was braided and tied as fairly as Hamis