est nerve of thought, of
danger, of joy, of dissatisfaction touched at Fort Loudon thrilled in
kind at Fort Prince George.

The attention of the group about the fire of the officers' mess-hall had
seldom been brought to themes so grave as the news of the recent
massacre, holding so definite and possible a personal concern, and after
the evening of the Christmas ball life at Fort Loudon began to seem more
serious and the current event to be scanned and questioned as to a
probable bearing on the future.

Even Odalie's optimistic mind, forever alert to hope and fair presage,
felt the influence of the atmospheric change of the moral conditions.
But the fact was revealed to her in an incident sufficiently startling.

That morning after the festivity, when gayly rowing down the bleak river
to MacLeod's Station, as the bend had begun to be called, she looked
blithely enough over the stream's gray stretches of ruffled steel to the
snowy slopes of the banks, and to the brown woods, and beyond to the
dark bronze and dusky blue mountains as they stretched away in varying
distance. The dull suffusive flare of carmine beginning to show above
them seemed a spell to drive the day-star out of the sky, to bid the
weird mists hie home with the fancies of the night, to set a wind keenly
astir in a new dawn. All this she watched with eyes as clear, as soft,
as confiding as if it were a May morning coming over the mountains,
scattering the largesse of the spring--new life, new hopes, new
strength, and all the glad inspiration of success that has a rarer,
finer flavor than the actual consummation of the triumph.

The stationers landed at the bend, and she was glad of her home as she
took her way within the enclosure of the high stockade. She looked
around at it, still leading the sleepy Fifine by one hand and only half
hearing Hamish's enthusiastic sketches of the boys and girls in the
settlement, with whom he had made fast friends. The snow was heavy on
the roofs of the two log cabins and the shanty of poles that served as a
barn, and lay in fluffy masses between the sharp points of the palisades
and on the bare boughs of sundry great trees that Odalie had insisted
should not be cut away with the rest in the enclosure or "girdled" like
those outside in the field. The smoke still curled up lazily from the
chimneys, and after she had uncovered the embers and donned her rough
homespun dress and housewifely apron and cap, and had the prepara