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To tear the hood and mantle from her figure in the sudden fury that seized him, and to fiercely demand the reason of this masquerade, was his only return to her greeting. “Why are you here? did you steal these garments?” he again demanded in her guttural language, as he shook her roughly by the arm. The Princess hung her head. “Did you?” he screamed, as he reached wildly for his rifle.

“I did?”

His hold relaxed, and he staggered back against the wall. The Princess began to whimper. Between her sobs, she was trying to explain that the Major and his daughter were going away, and that they wanted to send her to the Reservation; but he cut her short. “Take off those things!” The Princess tremblingly obeyed. He rolled them up, placed them in the canoe she had just left, and then leaped into the frail craft. She would have followed, but with a great oath he threw her from him, and with one stroke of his paddle swept out into the fog, and was gone.

“Jessamy,” said the Major, a few days after, as he sat at dinner with his daughter, “I think I can tell you something to match the mysterious disappearance and return of your wardrobe. Your crazy friend, the recluse, has enlisted this morning in the Fourth Artillery. He’s a splendid-looking animal, and there’s the right stuff for a soldier in him, if I’m not mistaken. He’s in earnest too, for he enlists in the regiment ordered back to Washington. Bless me, child, another goblet broken; you’ll ruin the mess in glassware, at this rate!”

“Have you heard anything more of the Princess, papa?”

“Nothing, but perhaps it’s as well that she has gone. These cursed settlers are at their old complaints again about what they call ‘Indian depredations,’ and I have just received orders from head-quarters to keep the settlement clear of all vagabond aborigines. I am afraid, my dear, that a strict construction of the term would include your protegee.”

The time for the departure of the Fourth Artillery had come. The night before was thick and foggy. At one o’clock, a shot on the ramparts called out the guard and roused the sleeping garrison. The new sentry, Private Grey, had challenged a dusky figure creeping on the glacis, and, receiving no answer, had fired. The guard sent out presently returned, bearing a lifeless figure in their arms. The new sentry’s zeal, joined with an ex-frontiersman’s aim, was fatal.

They laid the helpless, ragged form before the guard-house door, and then saw for the first time that it was the Princess. Presently she opened her eyes. They fell upon the agonized face of her innocent slayer, but haply without intelligence or reproach.

“Georgy!” she whispered.

“Bob!”

“All’s same now. Me get plenty well soon. Me make no more fuss. Me go to Reservation.”

Then she stopped, a tremor ran through her limbs, and she lay still. She had gone to the Reservation. Not that devised by the wisdom of man, but that one set apart from the foundation of the world for the wisest as well as the meanest of His creatures.