ball-room.
Suddenly he started and leaned eagerly forward. A girl with the
bearing of a princess had just swept past him, leaning on the arm of
General Gage, commander-in-chief of His Majesty's forces in America.
She was robed in corn-colored silk and wore a string of great pearls
twined in the jetty braids of her hair. As her dress brushed Donald,
he seemed to feel the breath of the forest on his cheek.

"Who is she?" he asked of a young officer standing beside him.

"Who? Oh! The girl the general is so taken with? The belle of the
evening? The sensation of the hour? Surely you don't need to be told
who she is?"

"But I do," replied Donald, impatiently; "for I have only just come."

"Ah! Well then, she is--To tell you the truth, I don't know exactly
who she is, except that she is an Indian princess from the far west,
and some say that she is the daughter of Pontiac himself. But she was
educated in France, and all that sort of thing, you know. They say she
is worth--" Here the speaker paused, for his listener had departed.

Shortly afterwards, Donald Hester was the most envied man in the room;
for the beauty of the ball was leaning on his arm, smiling up in his
face and talking to him with all the familiarity of old
acquaintanceship.

"Lucky dog, that Hester!" remarked one dapper youth to another.

"Yes. They say she once saved him from the stake or something of the
kind, and that he has her monogram tattooed on his arm, don't you know?
Romantic, awfully."

Out on a broad veranda, from which they could see a flood of moon
silver flecking the waters of the bay, Donald was asking Ah-mo many
questions. How did she happen to be there? Where had she come from?
Why had he not known of her arrival sooner? Did she know that Edith
was to be married? Why had she left them so mysteriously and unkindly
on the Muskingum the year before?

To these the girl made answer that she had come from Oswego with her
kind friend, Madam Bullen, to be bridesmaid at the wedding of her dear
friend, Edith Hester.

"So that is Edith's mystery!" cried Donald, who had tried in vain to
find out who was to act in that capacity on the morrow.

"Possibly," assented Ah-mo, with the dear rippling laugh that had
haunted the young ensign ever since he first heard it on the far-away
Detroit. "And now, Mr. Hester, that--"

"_Mister_ Hester? It was not _Mister_ Hester on the banks of the
Wisconsin, Ah-mo."

"But that was a year