prayer.

Yet at this same moment Mrs. MacLeod, in her familiar gray serge gown
and red calash, was seen, calm and decorous, walking slowly across the
parade in the direction of the great hall of the northwest bastion. The
soldiers who met her doffed their hats with looks of deep respect. Now
and again she bowed to a settler with her pretty, stately
grace,--somewhat too pronounced an elegance for the wife of so poor a
man as MacLeod, it was thought, he being of less ornamental clay. She
hesitated at the door of the block-house, with a little air of
diffidence, as might befit a lady breaking in upon the time of men
presumed to be officially busy. The door opened, and with a bow of
mingled dignity and deprecation she entered, and as the door closed,
Hamish dropped the imitation of her manner, and bounded into the middle
of the room with a great gush of boyish laughter, holding out both arms
and crying, "Don't I look enticing! To see the fellows salaaming to the
very ground as I came across the parade!--what are you doing to my
frock, Captain Demere?" he broke off, suddenly. "It's just right.
Odalie fixed it herself."

"Don't scuffle up these frills so," Captain Demere objected. "Mrs.
MacLeod is wont to wear her frock precisely."

"Did O'Flynn mistake you for Mrs. MacLeod?" asked Stuart, relishing the
situation despite his anxiety.

"I wish you could have seen the way he drew down that red Irish mouth of
his," said Hamish, with a guffaw, "looking so genteel and pious!"

"I think it passes," said Demere, who was not optimistic; but now he too
was smiling a little.

"It passes!" cried Stuart, triumphantly.

For the height of Odalie and Hamish was exactly the same--five feet
eight inches. Hamish, destined to attain upward of six feet, had not yet
all his growth. The full pleated skirt with the upper portion drawn up
at the hips, and the cape about the shoulders, obviated the difference
between Odalie's delicately rounded slenderness and Hamish's lank
angularity. The cape of the calash, too, was thrown around the throat
and about the chin and mouth, and as she was wont to hold her head down
and look up at you from out the dusky red tunnel of its depths the
difference in the complexion and the expression of the hazel eyes of
each was hardly to be noticed in passing. To speak would have been
fatal, but Hamish had been charged not to speak. His chestnut curls,
brushed into a glossy similarity, crept out and lay on the fold