the men had been ordered
not to injure the woman, and she was glad, after all, to think that
Francois had escaped. Some days later one of the Hurons came to her door
and pointed significantly to a fresh scalp that hung at his belt. In the
belief that it was her lover's she grew ill and began to fade, but one
evening there came a faint tap at the door. She opened it to find a cap
on the door-step.

There was no writing, yet her heart rose in her bosom and the color came
back to her cheeks, for she recognized it as her lover's. Later, she
learned that Francois had kept to the forest until he reached the site of
Walkerville, where he had found a canoe and reached the American side in
safety. She afterward rejoined him in Detroit, and they were married at
the end of the war, through which he served with honor and satisfaction
to himself, being enabled to pay many old scores against the red-coats
and the Indians.

THE OLD LODGER

In 1868 there died in Detroit a woman named Marie Louise Thebault, more
usually called Kennette. She was advanced in years, and old residents
remembered when she was one of the quaintest figures and most assertive
spirits in the town, for until a few years before her death she was rude
of speech, untidy in appearance, loved nothing or respected nothing
unless it might be her violin and her money, and lived alone in a little
old house on the river-road to Springwells. Though she made shoes for a
living, she was of so miserly a nature that she accepted food from her
neighbors, and in order to save the expense of light and fuel she spent
her evenings out. Yet she read more or less, and was sufficiently
acquainted with Volney, Voltaire, and other skeptics to shock her church
acquaintances. Love of gain, not of company, induced her to lease one of
her rooms to a pious old woman, from whom she got not only a little rent,
but the incidental use of her fuel and light.

When the pious one tried to win her to the church it angered her, and
then, too, she had a way of telling ghost stories that Kennette laughed
at. One of these narratives that she would dwell on with especial
self-conviction was that of Lieutenant Muir, who had left his mistress,
when she said No to his pleadings, supposing that she spoke the truth,
whereas she was merely trying to be coquettish.

He fell in an attack on the Americans that night, and came back,
bleeding, to the girl who had made him throw his life away; he pressed