This young lady--so beautiful, so tenderly nurtured, so accomplished, and so splendidly jewelled--was the richest heiress in Bordeaux, a ward of the young King Louis XVI., _fiancée_ of the Comte d'Arcot, a high military noble, who had covered himself with distinction in India, and was now on his way home with a fabulous sum in livres, and, of course, with the liver complaint. But this noble demoiselle, successor of M. le Baron Beauchatel, Seigneur de Fontbrune and of St. Emilion, Seneschal of Bordeaux, and Commandant of the Chateau de Trompette, was the foundling of the Iroquois wigwam, the orphan child of Roderick MacGillivray and of that lonely and despairing mother who found her grave, uncoffined, in the savage solitude on the southern shore of the Horican. And now to solve this mystery. Beauchatel had conveyed the infant girl to Fort William Henry, and consigned her to the care of the baroness, a lady of gentle and amiable disposition. In pity for the helplessness of the child, she undertook its care, at first as a mere duty of humanity, but as months passed on, her regard became a strong love for this lonely little waif--a love all the stronger that she was herself without children, and had long ceased to hope that she would ever be a mother; so it seemed as if Heaven had sent this infant to fill up the void in her heart. She named her _Therese_, after herself; for she had been Mademoiselle Therese de St. Veran, a sister of the Marquis de Montcalm, and consequently was a lady of Nismes. Soon after her return to France with Beauchatel she died, and her last request was, that he would continue to protect the orphan which fate had so strangely committed to his care. The good and faithful soldier had learned to love the little girl as if she had been his own, and being without kinsmen or heirs to his title and estates, he obtained from the young King Louis XVI., then in the fourth year of his unhappy reign, as a reward for his services and those of his ancestors, permission to adopt her in legal form. The necessary documents were accordingly drawn up, sealed, signed, and registered; and thus the poor foundling of the Canadian forest, the child of Roderick MacGillivray of the Black Watch, became the heiress of the Chateau de Fontbrune and of the Seigneurie of Saint Emilion. On returning from America, the baron had served five years under M. Law de Lauriston in the East, upholding the interests of the French India Company against the Nabob of Bengal and the British, under Lord Clive. There he had met and become acquainted with Count d'Arcot, for whom he had conceived a sudden and vehement friendship--so much so, that, after his return to France, he resolved that, _bongré malgré_, his young ward should marry this soldier of fortune; for such he was, having been created Count d'Ascot and Knight of St. Louis for his bravery at the recapture of that city of Hindostan, the capital of the Carnatic.