Madelon: A Novel

Madelon
A Novel

By
Mary E. Wilkins

Author of “A Humble Romance”
“Jane Field” etc.

New York
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1896

Love is the crown, and the crucifixion, of life,
and proves thereby its own divinity.

Chapter I

There was a new snow over the village. Indeed, it had ceased to fall only at sunset, and it was now eight o'clock. It was heaped apparently with the lightness of foam on the windward sides of the roads, over the fences and the stone walls, and on the village roofs. Its weight was evident only on the branches of the evergreen-trees, which were bent low in their white shagginess, and lost their upward spring.

There were evergreens—Norway pines, spruces, and hemlocks—bordering the road along which Burr Gordon was coming. Now and then he jostled a low-hanging bough and shook off its load of snow upon his shoulders. Then he walked nearer the middle of the street, tramping steadily through the new snow. This was an old road, but little used of late years, and the forest seemed to be moving upon it with the unnoted swiftness of a procession endless from the beginning of the world. In places the branches of the opposite pines stretched to each other like white-draped arms across the road, and slender, snow-laden saplings stood out in young crowds well in advance of the old trees. At times the road was no more than a cart-path through the forest; but it was a short-cut to the Hautville place, and that was why Burr Gordon went that way.

Everything was very still. The new-fallen snow seemed to muffle silence itself, and do away with that wide susceptibility to sound which affects one as forcibly as the crashing of cannon.

There was no whisper of life from the village, which lay a half-mile back; no roll of wheels, or shout, or peal of bell. Burr Gordon kept on in utter silence until he came near the Hautville house. Then he began to hear music: the soaring sweetness of a soprano voice, the rich undertone of a bass, and the twang of stringed instruments.

When he came close to the house the low structure itself, overlaid with snow, and with snow clinging to its gray-shingled sides like shreds of wool, seemed to vibrate and pulse and shake, and wax fairly sonorous with music, like an organ.

Burr Gordon stood still in the road and listened. The constituents of the concert resolved themselves to his ear. There was a wonderful soprano, a tenor, a bass, one sweet boy's voice, a bass-viol, and a violin. They were practising a fugue. The soprano rang out like the invitation of an angel,
“Come, my beloved, haste away,
Cut short the hours of thy delay,”
above all the others—even the shrill boy-treble. Then it followed, with noblest and sweetest order, the bass in—
“Fly like a youthful hart or roe,
Over the hills where the spices grow.”

The very breath of the spices of Arabia seemed borne into the young man's senses by that voice. He saw in vision the blue tops of those delectable hills where the myrtle and the cassia grew; he felt within his limbs the ardent impulse of the hart or roe. He stood with his head bent, listening, until the music ceased; the blue hills sank suddenly into the land of the past, and all the spice-plants withered away.

There was but a few minutes' interval; then there was a chorus—
“Strike the Timbrel.”

Burr Gordon, listening, heard in that only the great soprano, and it was to him like the voice of Miriam of old, summoning him to battle and glory.

But when that music ceased he did not wait any longer nor enter the house, but stole away silently. This time he travelled the main road, which intersected the old one at the Hautville house. The village lights shone before him all the way. He was half-way to the village when he met his cousin, Lot Gordon. He knew he was coming through the pale darkness of the night some time before he was actually in sight by his cough. Lot Gordon had had for years a sharp cough which afflicted him particularly when he walked abroad in night air. It carried as far as the yelp of a dog; when Burr first heard it he stopped short, and looked irresolutely at the thicket beside the road. He had a half-impulse to slink in there among the snowy bushes and hide until his cousin passed by. Then he shook his head angrily and kept on.

However, when the two men drew near each other Burr kept well to his side of the road and strode on rapidly, hoping his cousin might not recognize him. But Lot, with a hoarse laugh and another cough, swerved after him and jostled him roughly.

“Can't cheat me, Burr Gordon,” said he.

“I don't want to cheat you,” returned Burr, in a surly tone.

“You can't if you do. Set me down anywhere in the woods when there's a wind, and I'll tell ye what the trees are if it's so dark you can't see a leaf by the way the boughs blow. The maples strike out stiff like dead men's arms, and the elms lash like live snakes, and the pines stir all together like women. I can tell the trees no matter how dark 'tis by the way they move, and I can tell a Gordon by the swing of his shoulders, no matter how fast he slinks by on the other side in the shadow. You don't set much by me, Burr, and I don't set any too much by you, but we've got to swing our shoulders one way, whether we will or no, because our father and our grandfather did before us. Good Lord, aren't men in leading-strings, no matter how high they kick!”

“I can't stand here in the snow talking,” said Burr, and he tried to push past. But the other man stood before him with another laugh and cough. “You aren't talking, Burr; I'm the one that's talking, and I've heard stuff that was worse to listen to. You'd better stand still.”

“I tell you I'm going,” said Burr, with a thrust of his elbow in his cousin's side.

“Well,” said Lot, “go if you want to, or go if you don't want to. That last is what you're doing, Burr Gordon.”

“What do mean by that?”

“You're going to see Dorothy Fair when you want to see Madelon Hautville, because you don't want to do what you want to. Well, go on. I'm going to see Madelon and hear her sing. I've given up trying to work against my own motions. It's no use; when you think you've done it, you haven't. You never can get out of this one gait that you were born to except in your own looking-glass. Go and court Dorothy Fair, and in spite of yourself you'll kiss the other girl when you're kissing her. Well, I sha'n't cheat Madelon Hautville that way.”

“You know—she will not—you know Madelon Hautville never—” stammered Burr Gordon, furiously.

Lot laughed again. “You think she sets so much by you she'll never kiss me,” said he. “Don't be too sure, Burr. Nature's nature, and the best of us come under it. Madelon Hautville's got her place, like all the rest. There isn't a rose that's too good to take a bee in. Go do your own courting, and trust me to do mine. Courting's in our blood—I sha'n't disgrace the family.”

Burr Gordon went past his cousin with a smothered ejaculation. Lot laughed again, and tramped, coughing, away to the Hautville house. When he drew near the house the chorus within were still practising “Strike the Timbrel.” When he opened the door and entered there was no cessation in the music, but suddenly the girl's voice seemed to gain new impulse and hurl itself in his face like a war-trumpet.

Burr Gordon kept on to Minister Jonathan Fair's great house in the village, next the tavern. There was a light in the north parlor, and he knew Dorothy was expecting him. He raised the knocker, and knew when it fell that a girl's heart within responded to it with a wild beat.

He waited until there was a heavy shuffle of feet in the hall and the door opened, and Minister Fair's black servant-woman stood there flaring a candle before his eyes.

“Who be you?” said she, in her rich drone, which had yet a twang of hostility in it.

Burr Gordon ignored her question. “Is Miss Dorothy at home?” said he.

“Yes, she's at home, I s'pose,” muttered the woman, grudgingly. She distrusted this young man as a suitor for Dorothy. The girl's mother had long been dead, and this old dark woman, whose very thoughts seemed to the village people to move on barbarian pivots of their own, had a jealous guardianship of her which exceeded that of her father.

Now she filled up the doorway before Burr Gordon with her majestic, palpitating bulk, her great black face stiffened back with obstinacy. It was said that she had been born in Africa, and had been a princess in her own country; and, indeed, she bore herself like one now, and held up her orange-turbaned head as if it were crowned, and bore her candle like a flaming sceptre which brought out strange gleams of color and metallic lustres from her garments and the rows of beads on her black neck.

Burr Gordon made an impatient yet deferential motion to enter. “I would like to see her a few minutes if she is at home,” said he.

The woman muttered something which might have been in her native dialect, the words were so rolled into each other under her thick tongue. Her small, sharp eyes were fairly malicious upon the young man's handsome face.

“I don't know what you say,” he said, half angrily. “Can't I see her?”

“She's in the north parlor, I s'pose,” muttered the black woman; and she stood aside and let Burr Gordon pass in, following him with her hostile eyes as he opened the north-parlor door. Dorothy Fair sat with her embroidery-work at the mahogany table, whereon a whole branch of candles burned in silver sticks. She was working a muslin collar for her own adornment, and she set a fine stitch in a sprig before she rose up, either to prove her self-command to herself or to Burr Gordon. She had also held herself quiet during the delay in the hall.

Dorothy Fair came of a gentle and self-controlled race of New England ministers; but now her young heart carried her away. She stood up; her embroidery, with her scissors and bodkin, slid to the ground, and she came forward with her fair curls dropping around a face pink and smiling openly with love like a child's, and was, seemingly half of her own accord, in Burr Gordon's arms with her lips meeting his; and then they sat down side by side on the north-parlor sofa.

Dorothy Fair's face was very sweet to see; her blue eyes and her soft lips were innocent and fond under her lover's gaze. Her little white hand clung to his like a baby's. There was a sweet hollow under her chin, above her fine lace collar. Her soft, fair curls smelt in his face of roses and lavender. The utter daintiness of this maiden Dorothy Fair was a separate charm and a fascination full of subtle and innocent earthiness to the senses of a lover. She appealed to his selfish delight like a sweet-scented flower, like a pink or a rose.

Lot Gordon had been only half right in his analysis of his cousin's wooing. When Burr sat with his arm around this maiden's waist, with his face bent tenderly down towards the soft, pink cheek on his shoulder, this sweetness near at hand was wellnigh sufficient for him, and Dorothy's shy murmur of love in his ear overcame largely the memory of the other's wonderful song. A bee cares only for the honey and not for the flower, therefore one flower is as dear to him as another; and so it is with many a lover when he gets fairly to tasting love. The memory of the rose before fades, even if he never wore it. Then, too, Burr Gordon had a sense of approbation from his shrewder self which sustained him. This Dorothy Fair, the minister's daughter, of gentle New England lineage, the descendant of college-learned men, and of women who had held themselves with a fine dignity and mild reserve in the village society, the sole heiress of what seemed a goodly property to the simple needs of the day, appealed to his reason as well as his heart. He remained until near midnight, while the old black woman crouched with the patience of a watching animal outside the door, and he wooed Dorothy Fair with ardor and delight, although her softly affectionate kisses were to Madelon Hautville's as the fall of snow-flakes to drops of warm honey. And although after he had gone home and fallen asleep his dreams were mixed, still when he waked with the image of Madelon between himself and Dorothy, because sleep had set his heart free, it was still with that sense of approbation.

Madelon Hautville was not considered a fair match for a young man who had claims to ambition. The Hautville family held a peculiar place in public estimation. They belonged not to any defined stratum of the village society, but formed rather a side ledge, a cropping, of quite another kind, at which people looked askance. One reason undoubtedly was the mixture of foreign blood which their name denoted. Anything of alien race was looked upon with a mixture of fear and aversion in this village of people whose blood had flowed in one course for generations. The Hautvilles were said to have French and Indian blood yet, in strong measure, in their veins; it was certain that they had both, although it was fairly back in history since the first Hautville, who, report said, was of a noble French family, had espoused an Iroquois Indian girl. The sturdy males of the family had handed down the name and the characteristics of the races through years of intermarriage with the English settlers. All the Hautvilles—the father, the four sons, and the daughter—were tall and dark, and straight as arrows, and they all had wondrous grace of manner, which abashed and half offended, while it charmed, the stiff village people. Not a young man in the village, no matter how finely attired in city-made clothing, had the courtly air of these Hautville sons, in their rude, half-woodland garb; not a girl, not even Dorothy Fair, could wear a gown of brocade with the grace, inherited from a far-away French grandmother, with which Madelon Hautville wore indigo cotton.

Moreover, the whole family was as musical as a band of troubadours, and while that brought them into constant requisition and gave them an importance in the town, it yet caused them to be held with a certain cheapness. Music as an end of existence and means of livelihood was lightly estimated by the followers of the learned professions, the wielders of weighty doctrines and drugs, and also by the tillers of the stern New England soil. The Hautvilles, furnishing the music in church, and for dances and funerals, were regarded much in the light of mountebanks, and jugglers with sweet sounds. People wondered that Lot and Burr Gordon should go to their house so much. Not a week all winter but Burr had been there once or twice, and Lot had been there nearly every night when his cousin was not. And he stayed late also—this night he outstayed Burr at Dorothy Fair's. The music was kept up until a late hour, for Madelon proposed tune after tune with nervous ardor when her father and brothers seemed to flag. Nobody paid much attention to Lot; he was too constant a visitor. He settled into a favorite chair of his near the fire, and listened with the firelight playing over his delicate, peaked face. Now and then he coughed.

Old David Hautville, the father, stood out in front of the hearth by his great bass-viol, leaning fondly over it like a lover over his mistress. David Hautville was a great, spare man—a body of muscles and sinews under dry, brown flesh, like an old oak-tree. His long, white mustache curved towards his ears with sharp sweeps, like doves' wings. His thick, white brows met over his keen, black eyes. He kept time with his head, jerking it impatiently now and then, when some one lagged or sped ahead in the musical race.

Three of the Hautville sons were men grown. One, Louis, laid his dark, smooth cheek caressingly against the violin which he played. Eugene sang the sonorous tenor, and Abner the bass, like an organ. The youngest son, Richard, small and slender as a girl, so like Madelon that he might have been taken for her had he been dressed in feminine gear, lifted his eager face at her side and raised his piercing, sweet treble, which seemed to pass beyond hearing into fancy. Madelon, her brown throat swelling above her lace tucker, like a bird's, stood in the midst of the men, and sang and sang, and her wonderful soprano flowed through the harmony like a river of honey; and yet now and then it came with a sudden fierce impetus, as if she would force some enemy to bay with music. Madelon was slender, but full of curves which were like the soft breast of a bird before an enemy. Sometimes as she sang she flung out her slender hands with a nervous gesture which had hostility in it. Truth was that she hated Lot Gordon both on his own account and because he came instead of his cousin Burr. She had expected Burr that night; she had taken his cousin's hand on the doorlatch for his. He had not been to see her for three weeks, and her heart was breaking as she sang. Any face which had appeared to her instead of his in the doorway that night would have been to her as the face of a bitter enemy or a black providence, but Lot Gordon was in himself hateful to her. She knew, too, by a curious revulsion of all her senses from unwelcome desire, that he loved her, and the love of any man except Burr Gordon was to her like a serpent.

She would not look at him, but somehow she knew that his eyes were upon her, and that they were full of love and malice, and she knew not which she dreaded more. She resolved that he should not have a word with her that night if she could help it, and so she urged on her father and her brothers with new tunes until they would have no more, and went off to bed—all except the boy Richard. She whispered in his ear, and he stayed behind with her while she mixed some bread and set it for rising on the hearth.

Lot Gordon sat watching her. There was a hungry look in his hollow blue eyes. Now and then he coughed painfully, and clapped his hand to his chest with an impatient movement.

“Well, whether I ever get to heaven or not, I've heard music,” he said, when she passed him with the bread-bowl on her hip and her soft arm curved around it. He reached out his slender hand and caught hold of her dress-skirt; she jerked away with a haughty motion, and set the bowl on the hearth. “You'd better rake down the fire now, Richard,” said she.

The boy jostled Lot roughly as he passed around him to get the fire-shovel. Lot looked at the clock, and the hand was near twelve. He arose slowly.

“I met Burr on his way down to Parson Fair's,” he said.

Madelon covered up the bread closely with a linen towel. There was a surging in her ears, as if misery itself had a veritable sound, and her face was as white as the ashes on the hearth, but she kept it turned away from Lot.

“Well,” said he, in his husky drawl, “a rose isn't a rose to a bee, she's only a honey-pot; and she's only one out of a shelfful to him; she can't complain, it's what she was born to. If she finds any fault it's got to be with creation, and what's one rose to face creation? There's nothing to do but to make the best of it. Good-night, Madelon.”

“Good-night,” said Madelon. The color had come back to her cheeks, and she looked back at him proudly, standing beside her bread-bowl on the hearth.

Lot passed out, turning his delicate face over his shoulder with a subtle smile as he went. Richard clapped the door to after him with a jar that shook the house, and shot the bolt viciously. “I'll get my gun and follow him if you say so, and then I'll find Burr Gordon,” he said, turning a furious face to his sister.

“Would you make me a laughing-stock to the whole town?” said she. “Rake down the fire; it's time to go to bed.”

She looked as proudly at her brother as she had done at Lot. The resemblance between the two faces faded a little as they confronted each other. A virile quality in the boy's anger made the difference of sex more apparent. He looked at her, holding his wrath, as it were, like a two-edged sword which must smite some one. “If I thought you cared about that man that has jilted you—and I've heard the talk about it,” said he, “I'd feel like shooting you.”

“You needn't shoot,” returned Madelon.

The boy looked at her as angrily as if she were Burr Gordon. Suddenly her mouth quivered a little and her eyes fell. The boy flung both his arms around her. “I don't care,” he said, brokenly, in his sweet treble—“I don't care, you're the handsomest girl in the town, and the best and the smartest, and not one can sing like you, and I'll kill any man that treats you ill—I will, I will!” He was sobbing on his sister's shoulder; she stood still, looking over his dark head at the snow-hung window and the night outside. Her lips and eyes were quite steady now; she had recovered self-control when her brother's failed him, as if by some curious mental seesaw.

“No man can treat me ill unless I take it ill,” said she, “and that I'll do for no man. There's no killing to be done, and if there were I'd do it myself and ask nobody. Come, Richard, let me go; I'm going to bed.” She gave the boy's head a firm pat. “There's a turnover in the pantry, under a bowl on the lowermost shelf,” said she; and she laughed in his passionate, flushed face when he raised it.

“I don't care, I will!” he cried.

“Go and get your turnover; I saved it for you,” said she, with a push.

Neither of them dreamed that Lot Gordon had been watching them, standing in a snow-drift under the south window, his eyes peering over the sill, his forehead wet with a snow-wreath, stifling back his cough. When at last the candlelight went out in the great kitchen he crept stiffly and wearily through the snow.

Chapter II

Lot Gordon lived about half a mile away in the old Gordon homestead alone, except for an old servant-woman and her husband, who managed his house for him and took care of the farm. Lot himself did not work in the common acceptance of the term. His father had left him quite a property, and he did not need to toil for his bread. People called him lazy. He owned nearly as many books as the parson and the lawyer. He often read all night it was said, and he roamed the woods in all seasons. Under low-hanging winter boughs and summer arches did Lot Gordon pry and slink and lie in wait, his fine, sharp face peering through snowy tunnels or white spring thickets like a white fox, hungrily intent upon the secrets of nature.

There was a deep mystery in this to the village people. They could not fathom the reason for a man's haunting wild places like a wild animal unless he hunted and trapped like the Hautville sons. They were suspicious of dark motives, upon which they exercised their imaginations.

Lot Gordon's talk, moreover, was an enigma to them. He was no favorite, and only his goodly property tempered his ill repute. People could not help identifying him, in a measure, with his noble old house, with the stately pillared portico, with his silver-plate and damask and mahogany, which his great-grandfather had brought from the old country, with his fine fields and his money in the bank. He held, moreover, a large mortgage on the house opposite, where Burr Gordon lived with his mother. Burr's father and Lot's, although sons of one shrewd father, had been of very different financial abilities. Lot's father kept his property intact, never wasting, but adding from others' waste. Burr's plunged into speculation, built a new house, for which he could not pay, married a wife who was not thrifty, and when his father died had anticipated the larger portion of his birthright. So Lot's father succeeded to nearly all the family estates, and in time absorbed the rest. Lot, at his father's death, had inherited the mortgage upon the estate of Burr and his mother. Burr's father had died some time before. Lot was rumored to be harder, in the matter of exacting heavy interest, than his father had been. It was said that Burr was far behind in his payments, and that Lot would foreclose. Burr had a better head than his father's, but he had terrible odds against him. There was only one chance for his release from difficulty, people thought. All the property, by a provision in the grandfather's will, was to fall to him if Lot died unmarried. Lot was twenty years older than Burr, and he coughed.

“Burr Gordon ain't makin' out much now,” people said; “the paint's all off his house and his land's run down, but there's dead men's shoes with gold buckles in the path ahead of him.”

Burr thought of it sometimes, although he turned his face from the thought, and Lot considered it when he took the mortgage note out of his desk and scored another installment of unpaid interest on it. “If a man's only his own debtor he won't be very hard on himself,” he said aloud, and laughed. Old Margaret Bean, his housekeeper, looked at him over her spectacles, but she did not know what he meant. She prepared many a valuable remedy for his cough from herbs and roots, but Lot would never taste them, and she made her old husband swallow them all as preventatives of colds, that they should not be wasted. Lot was coughing harder lately. To-night, after he returned from the Hautvilles', he had one paroxysm after another. He did not go to bed, but huddled over the fire wrapped in a shawl, with a leather-bound book on his knees, all night, holding to his chest when he coughed, then turning to his book again.

When daylight was fully in the room he blew out the candle, and went over to the window and looked out across the road at the house opposite, which had always been called the “new house” to distinguish it from the old Gordon homestead. It was not so solid and noble as the other, but it had sundry little touches of later times, which his father had always characterized as wasteful follies. For one thing, it was elevated ostentatiously far above the road-level upon terraces surmounted by a flight of stone steps. It fairly looked down, like any spirit of a younger age, upon the older house, which might have been regarded in a way as its progenitor.

The smoke was coming out of the kitchen chimney in the ell. Lot Gordon looked across. Burr was clearing the snow from the stone steps over the terraces. There had never been any lack of energy and industry in Burr to account for his flagging fortunes. He arose betimes every morning. Lot, standing well behind the dimity curtain, watched him flinging the snow aside like spray, his handsome face glowing like a rose.

“I suppose he is going to the party at the tavern to-night,” Lot murmured. Suddenly his face took on a piteous, wistful look like a woman's; tears stood in his blue eyes. He doubled over with a violent fit of coughing, then went back to his chair and his book.

This party had been the talk of the village for several weeks. It was to be an unusually large one. People were coming from all the towns roundabout. Burr Gordon had been one of the ringleaders of the enterprise. All day long he worked over the preparations, dragging out evergreen garlands from under the snow in the woods, cutting hemlock boughs, and trimming the ball-room in the tavern. Towards night he heard a piece of news which threatened to bring everything to a standstill. The dusk was thickening fast; Burr and the two young men who were working with him were hurrying to finish the decorations before candlelight when Richard Hautville came in. Burr started when he saw him. He looked so like his sister in the dim light that he thought for a moment she was there.

Richard did not notice him at all. He hustled by him roughly and approached the other two young men. “Louis can't fiddle to-night,” he announced, curtly. The young men stared at him in dismay.

“What's the trouble?” asked Burr.

“He's hurt his arm,” replied Richard; but he still addressed the other two, and made as if he were not answering Burr.

“Broke it?” asked one of the others.

“No; sprained it. He was clearing the snow off the barn roof and the ladder fell. It's all black-and-blue, and he can't lift it enough to fiddle to-night.”

The three young men looked at each other.

“What's going to be done?” said one.

“I don't know,” said Burr. “There's Davy Barrett, over to the Four Corners—I suppose we might get him if we sent right over.”

“You can't get him,” said Richard Hautville, still addressing the other two, as if they had spoken. “Louis said you couldn't. His wife's got the typhus-fever, and he's up nights watching with her—won't let anybody else. You can't get him.”

“We can't have a ball without a fiddler,” one young man said, soberly.

“Maybe Madelon would lilt for the dancing,” Burr Gordon said; and then he colored furiously, as if he had startled himself in saying it.

The boy turned on him. “Maybe you think my sister will lilt for you to dance, Burr Gordon!” cried he, and his face blazed white in Burr's eyes, and he shook his slender brown fist.

“Nobody wants your sister to lilt if she isn't willing to,” Burr returned, in a hard voice; and he snatched up a hemlock bough, and went away with it to the other side of the ball-room.

“My sister won't lilt for you, and you can have your ball the best way you can!” shouted the boy, his angry eyes following Burr. Then he went out of the ball-room with a leap, and slammed the door so that the tavern trembled.

The young men chuckled. “Injun blood is up,” said one.

“You'll be scalped, Burr,” called the other.

Burr came over to them with an angry stride. “Oh, quit fooling!” said he, impatiently. “What's going to be done?”

“Nothing can be done; we shall have to give the ball up for to-night unless you can get Madelon Hautville to lilt for the dancing,” returned one, and the other nodded assent. “That's the state of the case,” said he.

Burr scraped a foot impatiently on the waxed floor. “Go and ask her yourself, Daniel Plympton,” said he. “I don't see why it has all got to come on to me.”

“Can't,” replied Daniel Plympton, with a laugh. “Remember the falling out Eugene and I had at the house-raising? I ain't going to his house to ask his sister to lilt for my dancing.”

“You, then, Abner Little,” said Burr, peremptorily, to the other young man. He had a fair, nervous face, and he was screwing his forehead anxiously over the situation.

“Can't nohow, Burr,” said he. “I've got to drive four miles home, and milk, and take care of the horses, and shave, and get dressed, and then drive another three miles for my girl. I'm going to take one of the Morse girls, over at Summer Falls. I haven't got time to go down to the Hautvilles', and that's the truth, Burr.”

“You'll have to go yourself, Burr,” said Daniel Plympton, with a half-laugh.

“I can't,” said Burr, “and I won't, if we give the ball up.”

“What will all the out-of-town folks say?”

“I don't care what they say—they can play forfeits.”

“Forfeits!” returned Daniel Plympton with scorn. “What's kissing to dancing?” Daniel Plympton was somewhat stout but curiously light of foot, and accounted the best dancer in town. As he spoke he sprang up on his toes as if he had winged heels. “Forfeits!” repeated he, jerking his great flaxen head.

“Well, you can go yourself, then, and ask Madelon Hautville to lilt,” said Burr.

“I tell you I can't, Burr—I ain't mean enough.”

“Well, I won't, and that's flat.”

“I've got to go home, anyway,” said Abner Little. “What I want to know is—is there going to be any ball?”

“Oh, get your girl anyhow, Ab,” returned Daniel, with a great laugh; “there'll be something. If there ain't dancing, there'll be kissing, and that'll suit her just as well. And if she can't get enough here, why there's the ride home. Lord, I'd get a girl nearer home! You've got to drive six miles out of your way to Summer Falls and back. As for me, the quicker I get a girl off my hands the better. I'm going to take Nancy Blake because she lives next door to the tavern. Go along with ye, Ab; Burr and I will settle it some way.”

But it looked for some time after Abner Little left as if there would be no ball that night. They could not have any dance unless Madelon Hautville would sing for it, and both Daniel Plympton and Burr Gordon were determined not to ask her.

At half-past seven Madelon was all dressed for the ball, and neither of them had come to see her about it. She and all her brothers except Louis were going. They wondered who would play for the dancing, but supposed some arrangements would be made. “Burr Gordon will put it through somehow,” said Louis. “Maybe he'll ride over to Farnham Hollow and get Luke Corliss to fiddle.” Louis sat discontentedly by the fire, with his arm soaking in cider-brandy and wormwood.

“Farnham Hollow is ten miles away,” said Richard.

“His horse is fast; he'd get him here by eight o'clock,” returned Louis.

Madelon was radiant. In spite of herself, she was full of hope in going to the ball. She knew Dorothy Fair would not be present, since her father was the orthodox parson, and she had seen her own face in her glass. With her rival away, what could not a face like that do with a heart that leaned towards it of its own nature? Madelon dimly felt that Burr Gordon had to resist himself as well as her in this matter. She had tended a monthly rose in the south window all winter, and she wore two red roses in her black braids. Her cheeks and her lips were fuller of warm red life than the roses. She lowered her black eyes before her father and her brothers, for there was a light in them which she could not subdue, which belonged to Burr Gordon only. No costly finery had Madelon Hautville, but she had done some cunning needle-work on an old black-satin gown of her mother's, and it was fitted as softly over her sweet curves as a leaf over a bud. A long garland of flowers after her own design had she wrought in bright-colored silks around the petticoat, and there were knots of red ribbon to fasten the loopings here and there. And she wore another red rose in her lace tucker against her soft brown bosom. Madelon wore, too, trim black-silk stockings with red clocks over her slender ankles, and little black-satin shoes with steel buckles and red rosettes. Every one of her brothers, except the youngest, Richard, must needs compare her in his own heart, to her disparagement, with some maid not his sister, but they all viewed her with pride. Old David Hautville's eyes, under his thick, white brows, followed her and dwelt upon her as she moved around the kitchen.

Madelon had got out her red cloak and her silk hood, and it was nearly time to start when there was a knock on the door. Madelon's face was pale in a second, then red again. She pushed Richard aside. “I'll go to the door,” said she.

She knew somehow that it was Burr Gordon, and when she opened the door he stood there. He looked curiously embarrassed, but she did not notice that. His mere presence for the moment seemed to fill all her comprehension. She had no eye for shades of expression.

“Come in,” said she, all blushing and trembling before him, and yet with a certain dignity which never quite deserted her.

“Can I see you a minute?” Burr said, awkwardly.

“Come this way.”

Madelon led the way into the best room, where there was no fire. It had not been warmed all winter, except on nights when Burr had come courting her. In the midst of it the great curtained bedstead reared itself, holding its feather-bed like a drift of snow. The floor was sanded in a fine, small pattern, there were white tasselled curtains at the windows, and there was a tall chest of drawers that reached the ceiling. The room was just as Madelon's mother, who had been one of the village girls, had left it.

Madelon glanced at the hearth, where she had laid the wood symmetrically—all ready to be kindled at a moment's notice should Burr come. “I'll light the fire,” said she, in a trembling voice.

“No, I can't stop,” returned the young man. “I've got to go right up to the tavern. Look here, Madelon—”

“Well?” she murmured, trembling.

“I want to know if—look here, won't you lilt for the dancing to-night, Madelon?”

Madelon's face changed. “That's all he came for,” she thought. She turned away from him. “You'd better get Luke Corliss to fiddle,” she said, coldly.

“We can't. I started to go over there, and I met a man that lives next door to him, and he said it was no use, for Luke had gone down to Winfield to fiddle at a ball there.”

“I don't feel like lilting to-night,” said Madelon.

The young man colored. “Well,” said he, in a stiff, embarrassed voice, and he turned towards the door, “we won't have any ball to-night, that's all,” he added.

“Well, you can go visiting instead,” returned Madelon, suddenly.

“I'd rather go a-visiting—here!” cried Burr, with a quick fervor, and he turned back and came close to her.

Madelon looked at him sharply, steeling her heart against his tender tone, but he met her gaze with passionate eyes.

“Oh, Madelon, you look so beautiful to-night!” he whispered, hoarsely. Her eyes fell before his. She made, whether she would or not, a motion towards him, and he put his arms around her. They kissed again and again, lingering upon each kiss as if it were a foothold in heaven. A great rapture of faith in her lover and his love came over Madelon. She said to herself that they had lied—they had all lied! Burr had never courted Dorothy Fair. She believed, with her whole heart and soul, that he loved her and her alone. And, indeed, she was at that time, at that minute, right and not deceived; for Burr Gordon was one of those who can encompass love in one tense only, and that the present; and they who love only in the present, hampered by no memories and no dreams, yield out love's sweetness fully. All Burr Gordon's soul was in his kisses and his fond eyes, and her own crept out to meet it with perfect faith.

“I will lilt for the dancing,” she whispered.

The Hautvilles were going to the ball on their wood-sled, drawn by oxen. David was to drive them, and take the team home. It was already before the door when Burr came out, and Madelon asked him to ride with them, but he refused. “I've got to go home first,” he said, and plunged off quickly down the old road, the short-cut to his house.

Madelon Hautville, in her red cloak and her great silk hood, stood in the midst of her brothers on the wood-sled, and the oxen drew them ponderously to the ball. The tavern was all alight. Many other sleds were drawn up before the door; indeed, certain of the young men who had not their especial sweethearts took their ox-sleds and went from door to door collecting the young women. Many a jingling load slipped along the snowy road to the tavern that night, and the ball-room filled rapidly.

At eight o'clock the ball opened. Madelon stood up in the little gallery allotted to the violins and lilted, and the march began. Two and two, the young men and the girls swung around the room. Madelon lilted with her eyes upon the moving throng, gay as a garden in a wind; and suddenly her heart stood still, although she lilted on. Down on the floor below Burr Gordon led the march, with Dorothy Fair on his arm. Dorothy Fair, waving a great painted fan with the tremulous motion of a butterfly's wing, with her blue brocade petticoat tilting airily as she moved, like an inverted bell-flower, with a locket set in brilliants flashing on her white neck, with her pink-and-white face smiling out with gentle gayety from her fair curls, stepped delicately, pointing out her blue satin toes, around the ball-room, with one little white hand on Burr Gordon's arm.

Chapter III

Suddenly all Madelon's beauty was cheapened in her own eyes. She saw herself swart and harsh-faced as some old savage squaw beside this fair angel. She turned on herself as well as on her recreant lover with rage and disdain—and all the time she lilted without one break.

The ball swung on and on, and Madelon, up in the musicians' gallery, sang the old country-dances in the curious dissyllabic fashion termed lilting. It never occurred to her to wonder how it was that Dorothy Fair, the daughter of the orthodox minister, should be at the ball—she who had been brought up to believe in the sinful and hellward tendencies of the dance. Madelon only grasped the fact that she was there with Burr; but others wondered, and the surprise had been great when Dorothy in her blue brocade had appeared in the ball-room.

This had been largely of late years a liberal and Unitarian village, but Parson Fair had always held stanchly to his stern orthodox tenets, and promulgated them undiluted before his thinning congregations and in his own household. Dorothy could not only not play cards or dance, but she could not be present at a party where the cards were produced or the fiddle played. There was, indeed, a rumor that she had learned to dance when she was in Boston at school, but no one knew for certain.

Dorothy Fair was advancing daintily between the two long lines, holding up her blue brocade to clear her blue-satin shoes, to meet the young man from the opposite corner, flinging out gayly towards her, when suddenly, with no warning whatever, a great dark woman sped after her through the dance, like a wild animal of her native woods. She reached out her black hand and caught Dorothy by the white, lace-draped arm, and she whispered loud in her ear.

The people near, finding it hard to understand the African woman's thick tongue, could not exactly vouch for the words, but the purport of her hurried speech they did not mistake. Parson Fair had discovered Mistress Dorothy's absence, and home she must hasten at once. It was evident enough to everybody that staid and decorous Dorothy had run away to the ball with Burr Gordon, and a smothered titter ran down the files of the Virginia reel.

Burr Gordon cast a fierce glance around; then he sprang to Dorothy's side, and she looked palely and piteously up at him.

He pulled her hand through his arm and led her out of the ball-room, with the black woman following sulkily, muttering to herself. Burr bent closely down over Dorothy's drooping head as they passed out of the door. “Don't be frightened, sweetheart,” whispered he. Madelon saw him as she lilted, and it seemed to her that she heard what he said.

It was not long after when she felt a touch on her shoulder as she sat resting between the dances, gazing with her proud, bright eyes down at the merry, chattering throng below. She turned, and her brother Richard stood there with a strange young man, and Richard held Louis's fiddle on his shoulder.

“This is Mr. Otis, Madelon,” said Richard, “and he came up from Kingston to the ball, and he can fiddle as well as Louis, and he said 'twas a shame you should lilt all night and not have a chance to dance yourself; and so I ran home and got Louis's fiddle, and there are plenty down there to jump at the chance of you for a partner—and—” the boy leaned forward and whispered in his sister's ear: “Burr Gordon's gone—and Dorothy Fair.”

Madelon turned her beautiful, proud face towards the stranger, and did not notice Richard at all. “Thank you, sir,” said she, inclining her long neck; “but I care not to dance—I'd as lief lilt.”

“But,” said the strange young man, pressing forward impetuously and gazing into her black eyes, “you look tired; 'tis a shame to work you so.”

“I rest between the dances, and I am not tired,” said Madelon, coldly.

“I beg you to let me fiddle for the rest of the ball,” pleaded the young man. “Let me fiddle while you dance; you may be sure I'll fiddle my best for you.”

A tender note came into his voice, and, curiously enough, Madelon did not resent it, although she had never seen him before and he had no right. She looked up in his bright fair face with sudden hesitation, and his blue eyes bent half humorously, half lovingly upon her. She had a fierce desire to get away from this place, out into the night, and home. “I do not care to dance,” said she, falteringly; “but I could go home, if you felt disposed to fiddle.”

“Then go home and rest,” cried the stranger, brightly. “'Tis a strain on the throat to lilt so long, and you cannot put in a new string as you can in a fiddle.”

With that the young man came forward to the front of the little gallery, and Madelon yielded up her place hesitatingly.

“But you cannot dance yourself, sir,” said she.

“I have danced all I want to to-night,” he replied, and began tuning the fiddle.

“I'm sure I'm much obliged to you, sir,” Madelon said, and got her hood and cloak from the back of the gallery with no more parley.

The young man cast admiring glances after her as she went out, with her young brother at her heels.

“I'm going home with you,” Richard said to her as they went down the gallery stairs.

“Not a step,” said she. “You've just been after the fiddle, and they're going to dance the Fisher's Hornpipe next.”

“You'll be afraid in that lonesome stretch after you leave the village.”

“Afraid!” There was a ring of despairing scorn in the girl's voice, as if she faced already such woe that the supposition of new terror was an absurdity.

They had come down to the ball-room floor, and were standing directly in front of the musicians' gallery. The young fiddler, Jim Otis, leaned over and looked at them.

“I don't care,” said Richard, “I won't let you go alone unless you take my knife.”

Madelon laughed. “What nonsense!” said she, and tried to pass her brother.

But Richard held her by the arm while he rummaged in his pocket for the great clasp-knife which he had earned himself by the sale of some rabbit-skins, and which was the pride of his heart and his dearest treasure, and opened it. “Here,” said he, and he forced the clasp-knife into his sister's hand. Otis, leaning over the gallery, saw it all. Many of the dancers had gone to supper; there was no other person very near them. “If you should meet a bear, you could kill him with that knife—it's so strong,” said the boy. “If you don't take it I'll go home with you, and it's so late father won't let me come out again to-night.”

“Well, I'll take it,” Madelon said, wearily, and she passed out of the ball-room with the knife in her hand, under her cloak.

When she got out in the cold night air she sped along fast over the creaking snow, still holding the knife clutched fast in her hand. She began to lilt again as she went, and again Burr and Dorothy danced together before her eyes. She passed Parson Fair's house, and the best-room windows were lighted. She thought that Burr was there, and she lilted more loudly the Virginia reel.

After Parson Fair's house was some time left behind, and she had come into the lengthy stretch of road, she saw a shadowy figure ahead. She could not at first tell whether it was moving towards or from her—whether it was a man or a woman; or, indeed, whether it were not a forest tree encroaching on the road and moving in the wind. She kept on swiftly, holding her knife under her cloak. She had stopped singing.

Presently she saw that the figure was a man, and coming her way; and then her heart stood still, for she knew by the swing of his shoulders that it was Burr Gordon. She threw back her proud head and sped along towards him, grasping her knife under her cloak and looking neither to the right nor left. She swerved not her eyes a hair's-breadth when she came close to him—so close that their shoulders almost touched in passing in the narrow path.

Suddenly there was a quick sigh in her ear—“Oh, Madelon!” Then an arm was flung around her waist and hot lips were pressed to her own.

The mixed blood of two races, in which action is quick to follow impulse, surged up to Madelon's head. She drew the hand which held the knife from under her cloak and struck. “Kiss me again, Burr Gordon, if you dare!” she cried out, and her cry was met by a groan as he fell away from her into the snow.

Chapter IV

Madelon stood for a second looking at the dark, prostrate form as one of her Iroquois ancestors might have looked at a fallen foe before he drew his scalping-knife; then suddenly the surging of the savage blood in her ears grew faint. She fell down on her knees beside him. “Have I killed you, Burr?” she said, and bent her face down to his—and it was not Burr, but Lot Gordon!

The white, peaked face smiled up at her out of the snow. “You haven't killed me if I die, since you took me for Burr,” whispered Lot Gordon.

“Are you much hurt?”

“I—don't know. The knife has gone a little way into my side. It has not reached my heart, but that was hurt unto death already by life, so this matters not.”

Madelon felt along his side and hit the handle of the clasp-knife, firmly fixed.

“Don't try to draw it out—you cannot,” said Lot, and his pain forced a groan from him. “I'll live, if I can, till the wound is healed for the sake of your peace. I'd be content to die of it, since you gave it in vengeance for another man's kiss, if it were not for you. But they shall never know—they shall never—know.” Lot's voice died away in a faint murmur between his parted lips; his eyes stared up with no meaning in them at the wintry stars.

Madelon ran back on the road to the village, taking great leaps through the snow, straining her eyes ahead. Now and then she cried out hoarsely, as if she really saw some one, “Hullo! hullo!” At the curve of the road she turned a headlong corner and ran roughly against a man who was hurrying towards her; and this time it was Burr Gordon.

Burr reeled back with the shock; then his face peered into hers with fear and wonder. “Is it you?” he stammered out. “What is the matter?”

But Madelon caught his arm in a hard grip. “Come, quick!” she gasped, and pulled him along the road after her.

“What is the matter?” Burr demanded, half yielding and half resisting.

Madelon faced him suddenly as they sped along. “I met your cousin Lot just below here and he kissed me, and I took him for you and stabbed him, if you must know,” she sobbed out, dryly.

Burr gave a choking cry of horror.

“I think I—have killed him,” said she, and pulled him on faster.

“And you meant to kill me?”

“Yes, I did.”

“I wish to God you had!” Burr cried out, with a sudden fierce anger at himself and her; and now he hurried on faster than she.

Lot was quite motionless when they reached him. Burr threw himself down in the snow and leaned his ear to his cousin's heart. Madelon stood over them, panting. Suddenly a merry roulade of whistling broke the awful stillness. Two men were coming down the road whistling “Roy's Wife of Alidivalloch” as clearly soft and sweet as flutes, accented with human gayety and mirth.

On came the merry whistlers. Burr sprang up and grasped Madelon Hautville's arm. “He isn't dead,” he whispered, hoarsely. “Somebody's coming. Go home, quick!”

But Madelon looked at him with despairing obstinacy. “I'll stay,” said she.

“I tell you, go! Somebody is coming. I'll get help. I'll send for the doctor. Go home!”

“No!”

“Oh, Madelon, if you have ever loved me, go home!”

Madelon turned away at that. “I'll be there when they come for me,” said she, and went swiftly down the road and out of sight in the converging distance of trees, with the snow muffling her footsteps.

When she reached home she groped her way into the living-room, which was lighted only by the low, red gleam of the coals on the hearth. Her father's gruff voice called out from the bedroom beyond: “That you, Madelon?”

“Yes,” said she, and lighted a candle at the coals.

“Have the boys come?”

“No.”

Madelon went up the steep stairs to her chamber, but before she opened her door her brother Louis's voice, broken with pain, besought her to come into his room and bathe his sprained shoulder for him. She went in, set the candle on the table, and rubbed in the cider-brandy and wormwood without a word. Louis, in the midst of his pain, kept looking up wonderingly at his sister's face. It looked as if it were frozen. She did not seem to see him. Nothing about her seemed alive but her gently moving hands.

Suddenly he gave a startled cry. “What's that? Have you cut your hand, Madelon?” Madelon glanced at her hand, and there was a broad red stain over the palm and three of her fingers.

“No,” said she, and went on rubbing.

“But it looks like blood!” cried Louis, knitting his pale brows at her.

Madelon made no reply.

“Madelon, what is that on your hand?”

“Blood.”

“How came it there?”

“You'll know to-morrow.” Madelon put the stopper in the cider-brandy and wormwood bottle; then she covered up the wounded arm and went out.

“Madelon, what is it? What is the matter? What ails you?” Louis called after her.

“You'll know to-morrow,” said she, and shut her chamber door, which was nearly opposite Louis's. His youngest brother Richard occupied the same room, having his little cot at the other side, under the window. When he came in, an hour later, Louis turned to him eagerly.

“Has anything happened?” he demanded.

The boy's face, which was always so like his sister's, had the same despair in it now. “Don't know of anything that's happened,” he returned, surlily.

“What ails Madelon?”

“I tell you I don't know.” Richard would say no more. He blew out his candle and tumbled into bed, turned his face to the window and lay awake until and hour before dawn. Then he arose, dressed himself, and went down-stairs. He put more wood on the hearth fire, then knelt down before it, and puffed out his boyish cheeks at the bellows until the new flames crept through the smoke. Then he lighted the lantern, and went to the barn to milk and feed the stock. That was always Richard's morning task, and he always on his way thither replenished the hearth fire, that his sister Madelon might have a lighter and speedier task at preparing breakfast. Madelon usually arose a half-hour after Richard, and she was not behindhand this morning. She entered the great living-room, lit the candles, and went about getting breakfast. Human daily needs arise and set on tragedy as remorselessly as the sun.

Madelon Hautville, who had washed but a few hours ago the stain of murder from her hand, in whose heart was an unsounded depth of despair, mixed up the corn-meal daintily with cream, and baked the cakes which her father and brothers loved before the fire, and laid the table. She had always attended to the needs of the males of her family with the stern faithfulness of an Indian squaw. Now, as she worked, the wonder, softer than her other emotions, was upon her as to how they would get on when she was in prison and after she was dead; for she made no doubt that she had killed Lot Gordon and the sheriff would be there presently for her, and she felt plainly the fretting of the rope around her soft neck. She hoped they would not come for her until breakfast was prepared and eaten, the dishes cleared away, and the house tidied; but she listened like a savage for a foot-fall and a hand at the door. She had packed a little bundle ready to take with her before she left her chamber. Her cloak and hood were laid out on the bed.

When she sat down at the table with her father and brothers, all of them except Richard and Louis stared at her with open amazement and questioned her. Richard and Louis stared furtively at their sister's face, as stiff, set, and pale as if she were dead, but they asked no questions. Madelon said, in a voice that was not hers, that she was not sick, and put pieces of Indian cake into her untasting mouth and listened. But breakfast was well over and the dishes put away before anybody came. And then it was not the sheriff to hale her to prison on a charge of murder, but an old man from the village big with news.

He was a relative of the Hautvilles, an uncle on the mother's side, old and broken, scarcely able to find his feeble way on his shrunken legs through the snow; but, with the instinct of gossip, the sharp nose for his neighbors' affairs, still alert in him, he had arisen at dawn to canvass the village, and had come thither at first, since he anticipated that he might possibly have the delight of bringing the intelligence before any of the family had heard it elsewhere. He came in, dragging his old, snow-laden feet, tapping heavily with his stout stick, and settled, cackling, into a chair.

“Heard the news?” queried Uncle Luke basset, his eyes, like black sparks, twinkling rapidly at all their faces.

Madelon set the cups and saucers on the dresser.

“We don't have any time for anybody's business but our own,” quoth David Hautville, gruffly. He did not like his wife's uncle. He was tightening a string in his bass-viol; he pulled it as he spoke, and it gave out a fierce twang. Louis sat moodily over the fire with his painful arm in wet bandages. Richard was whittling kindling-wood, with nervous speed, beside him. Eugene and Abner were cleaning their guns. They all looked at the eager old man except Richard and Louis and Madelon.

“Burr Gordon has killed Lot so's to get his property,” proclaimed the old man, and his voice broke with eager delight and importance.

Madelon gave a cry and sprang forward in front of him. “It's a lie!” she shouted.

The old man laughed in her face. “No, 'tain't, Madelon. You're showin' a Christian sperrit to stan' up for him when he's jilted ye for another gal, but 'tain't a lie. His knife, with his name on to it, was a-stickin' out of Lot's side.”

“It's a lie! I killed him with my brother Richard's knife!”

The old man shrank back before her in incredulous horror. The great bass-viol fell to the ground like a woman as David strode forward and Abner and Eugene turned their shocked, white faces from their guns.

“I killed him with Richard's knife,” repeated Madelon.

Richard got up and came around before her, thrusting his hand in his pocket. He pulled out his own clasp-knife, and brandished it in her face. “Here is my knife,” he cried, fiercely—“my knife, with my name cut in the handle. Say you killed Lot Gordon with it again!”

Madelon snatched the knife out of her brother's hand and looked at it with straining eyes. There, indeed, was a rude “R. H.” cut in the horn handle. She gasped. “What does this mean?” she cried out.

“It means you have lost your wits,” answered Richard, contemptuously; but his eyes on his sister's face were full of pleading agony.

“What knife did you give me when I started home last night?”

“I gave you no knife.”

Old Luke Basset asserted himself again. “The gal's lost her balance,” he said. “It was Burr Gordon's knife, with his name cut into it, that was stickin' out of Lot Gordon's side.”

“Is Lot Gordon dead?” Louis demanded, hoarsely.

“No, he ain't dead, but the doctor thinks he can't live long. Ephraim Steele and Eleazer Hooper were a-goin' home from the ball when they come right on Lot layin' side of the road and Burr a-tryin' to draw his knife out, so it shouldn't testify against him.”

“It's a lie!” Madelon groaned. “Burr Gordon did not kill him. It was I! He met me, and tried to—kiss me, and—the knife was in my hand—Richard made me take it because I was coming home alone, and there had been rumors of a bear.”

“I did not,” persisted Richard, doggedly. “I did not make her take my knife. Here is my knife, with my name cut in the handle.”

Madelon turned on him fiercely. “You did, you know you did!” said she.

“Here is my knife, with my name cut on the handle.”

“You gave me a knife as I was coming out of the tavern.”

“No, I did not.”

“You did, and I killed him with it. It was not Burr! I ran for help, and I met Burr, and I told him what I had done, and he went back with me to Lot. Then he sent me home when he heard somebody coming. Ask Lot Gordon if I did not kill him; if he can speak he can tell you.”

“There won't neither him nor Burr say a word,” said the old man, “but there was Burr's knife a-stickin' into Lot's side, with his name cut into it.”

Madelon turned sharply to Louis. “You saw the blood on my hand when I was rubbing your arm last night,” she said.

He made no reply, but stared gloomily at the fire.

“Louis, you saw Lot Gordon's blood on my hand?”

Louis sprang up with an oath, and pushed past her out of the room.

“Louis,” Madelon cried, “tell them!”

“She is trying to shield Burr Gordon!” Louis called back, fiercely, and the closing door shook the house like a cannon-shot.

“Where is Burr?” Madelon demanded of old Luke Basset.

“The sheriff took him to New Salem to jail this morning,” he replied, grinning.

Madelon gave a great cry and started to rush out of the room, but her father stood in her way.

“Where are you going?” he asked, sternly.

“I am going to get my hood and cloak, and then I am going to Lot Gordon's.” Her father stood aside, and she went out and up-stairs to her chamber. She took up the red cloak which lay on her bed, and examined it eagerly to see if by chance there was a blood stain thereon to prove her guilt and Burr Gordon's innocence, but she could find none. She had flung it back when she struck. She looked also carefully at her pretty ball gown, but the black fabric showed no stain.

When she went down-stairs with her cloak and hood on old Luke Basset was gone, and so were her brothers. Her father stood waiting for her, and he had on his fur cap and his heavy cloak. He came forward and took her firmly by the arm. “I'm going with you to Lot Gordon's,” said he. And they went out together and up the road, he still keeping a firm hand on his daughter's arm, and neither spoke all the way to Lot Gordon's house.

When they reached it David Hautville opened the door without touching the knocker, and strode in with Madelon following. Old Margaret Bean was just passing through the entry with a great roll of linen cloths in her arms, and she stopped when she saw them.

“How is he?” whispered David, hoarsely.

“He's pretty low,” returned Margaret Bean, at the same time nodding her head cautiously towards the door on her right. Long, smooth loops of sallow hair fell from Margaret Bean's clean white cap over her cheeks, which looked as if they had been scrubbed and rasped red with tears. Her own gray hair was strained back out of sight—not to be discovered, even when there was a murder in the house.

“Does he know anybody?” queried David Hautville.

“Just as well as ever he did.” Margaret Bean rubbed a tear dry on her cheek with her starched apron.

“We've got to see him, then.”

“I dunno as you can—the doctor—”

“I don't care anything about the doctor! We've got to see him!” David's voice rang out quite loud in the hush of murder and death which seemed to fill the house. Margaret Bean stood aside with a scared look. David Hautville threw open the door on the right, and he and Madelon went in.

Lot Gordon's eyes turned towards them, but not his head. He lay as still in bed as if he were already dead, and his long body raised the gay patchwork quilt in a stiff ridge like a grave.

Madelon went close to him and bent over him. “Tell who stabbed you,” said she, in a sharp voice.

Lot looked up at her, and a red flush came over his livid face.

“Tell who stabbed you.”

Lot smiled feebly, but he did not speak.

Margaret Bean came in, with her old husband shuffling at her heels. A great face, bristling with a yellow stubble of beard, appeared in the door. It belonged to the sheriff, Jonas Hapgood, who had just returned from taking Burr to New Salem. Madelon cast a desperate glance around at them. “Lot Gordon,” she cried out, “tell them—tell them I was the one who stabbed you, and set Burr free!”

There was a chuckle from Jonas Hapgood in the door. “Likely story,” he muttered to Margaret Bean's husband, and the old man nodded wisely.

“Tell them!” commanded Madelon. She reached out a hand as if she would shake Lot Gordon into obedience, wounded unto death although he was, but Lot only smiled up in her face.

Then David Hautville bent his stern face down to the sick man's. “Lot Gordon, tell the truth before God, daughter of mine or no daughter of mine,” said he, in his deep voice. Lot only followed Madelon with his longing, smiling eyes.

“Speak, Lot Gordon!”

The wounded man turned his eyes on David and made a feeble motion, scarcely more than a quiver of his hand, which seemed to express negation.

“Can't you speak?”

Again Lot made that faint signal.

“He ain't spoke sence they brought him home,” said Margaret Bean—“not a word to the doctor nor nobody.”

“I couldn't get a word out of him,” announced the sheriff, stepping farther into the room. “In course, there was Burr's knife and Burr himself over him when the others came up, and that was proof enough; but still we kinder thought we'd like to have Lot's word for it afore he died, in case it came to hangin' with Burr; but I guess he's past speakin'. I miss my guess if he can sense anything we say.”

“Tell them—tell them I was the one who stabbed you, and Burr is innocent!” Madelon pleaded; but he smiled back at her unmoved.

Jonas Hapgood's great body shook with mirth. “Likely story a gal did it,” he chuckled.

“I did do it!” returned Madelon, fiercely, turning to him.

“I guess you don't want your beau hung.”

“I tell you I killed this man. I am the one to be hung!”

Chapter V

The sheriff turned to David Hautville. “Guess you'd better take your gal home,” he said, his red, bristling cheeks broad with laughter. “Guess she's kind of off her balance, she feels so bad about her beau.”

David's black eyes flashed haughtily at Jonas Hapgood, who straightened his face suddenly. He deigned not a word to him, but he turned to his daughter with a stern air. “Whether it is one way, or whether it is the other way,” said he, “we go neither by staying here. Come home.”

“I won't go!”

David looked sharply at his daughter's face. Jonas Hapgood's doubt was over him too. He wondered, with a great spasm of wrath, if she could be accusing herself to shield this man who had played her false.

He grasped her arm again. “Come,” he said, “I'll have no more of this,” and Madelon went out with her father. Full of spirit as she was, she had always been strangely docile with him. He had ruled all his children with a firm hand from their youth up, and tuned their wills to suit his ear as he did his viol strings.

“I'll have no foolery,” he said to her, gruffly, when they were out on the road. “I'll have no putting yourself in the wrong to save a man that's given you the go-by. If ye be fooling me, ye can stop it now if you're a daughter of mine.” He shook his head fiercely at her.

But Madelon answered him with a burst of wrath that equalled his own. “I stabbed him because I took him for the man who jilted me a-trying to kiss me, with Dorothy Fair's kiss on his lips. Me!” she cried; and she raised her hand as if she would have struck again had Burr Gordon and his false lips been there.

Her father looked at her gloomily, then strode on with his eyes on the snowy ground. He was still in doubt. David Hautville had that primitive order of mind which distrusts and holds in contempt that which it cannot clearly comprehend, and he could not comprehend womankind. His sons were to him as words of one syllable in straight lines; his daughter was written in compound and involved sentences, as her mother had been before her. Fond and proud of Madelon as he was, and in spite of his stern anxiety, her word had not the weight with him that one of his son's would have had. It was as if he had visions of endless twistings and complexities which might give it the lie, and rob it, at all events, of its direct force.

Indeed, Madelon strengthened this doubt by crying out passionately all at once, as they went on: “Father, you must believe me! I tell you I did it! I—don't let them hang him! Father!” All Madelon's proud fierceness was gone for a moment. She looked up at her father, choking with great sobs.

David smiled down at her convulsed face. “She's nothing but a woman,” he thought to himself, and he thought also, with a throb of angry relief, that she had not killed Lot Gordon. “Come along home and red up the house, and let's have no more fooling,” he said, roughly, and strode on faster and would not say another word, although Madelon besought him hard to assure her that he believed her, and that Burr should not be hanged, until they reached the Hautville house. Then he turned on her and said, with keen sarcasm that stung more than a whip-lash, “'Tis Parson Fair's daughter and not mine that should come down the road in broad daylight a-bawling for Burr Gordon.”

Madelon started back, and her face stiffened and whitened. She shut her mouth hard and followed her father into the house. The great living-room was empty; indeed, not one of the Hautville sons was in the house; even Louis was gone. David took his axe out of the corner and set out for the woods to cut some cedar fire-logs. Madelon put the house in order, setting the kitchen and pantry to rights, going through the icy chambers and making the high feather beds. In her own room she paused long and searched again, holding up her red cloak and her ball dress to the window, where they caught the wintry light, for a stain of blood that might prove her guilt; but she could find none.

Madelon prepared dinner for her father and brothers as usual, and when it was ready to be dished she stood in the doorway, with the north wind buffeting her in the face, and blew the dinner-horn with a blast that could be heard far off in the woods.

Presently her father emerged from under the snowy boughs with his axe over his shoulder, and shortly afterwards Eugene and Abner came, in Indian file, with their guns. Eugene was carrying a fat rabbit by its long ears. Louis and Richard did not come at all. David asked sternly of their brothers where they were, but neither Eugene nor Abner knew. They had not seen them since David and Madelon left for Lot Gordon's that morning.

Madelon set the food before her father and her brothers, and took her place as usual, and ate as she might have filled a crock with milk or cakes, tasting nothing which she put into her mouth. She did not during the meal say another word concerning the tragedy in which she was living, but there was a strange silent vehemence and fire about her which seemed louder than speech. Now and then her father and her brothers started and stared at her as if she had cried out. Two red spots had come on her brown cheeks; her eyes were glittering with dark light; her lips were a firm red; her fingers stiffened with nervous clutches. She looked as if every muscle in her were strained and rigid for a leap.

After dinner Eugene and Abner went out again with their guns, and David smoked his old pipe by the fire, while Madelon put away the dishes and swept the floor. When her work was finished the pipe was smoked out, and David rose up slowly, clapped his fur cap over his white head, and took up his axe.

“Mind ye say what ye said this morning to nobody else,” he said, as he went out the door.

“I'll say it with my dying breath,” returned Madelon, and she caught her breath, as if it were indeed her last, as she spoke.

“Accuse yourself of murder, would ye, and be hung, and leave your own kith and kin with nobody to keep house for them, for the sake of a man that's left ye for another girl!”

“Father, I tell you that I did it!”

But David clapped to the door on her speech, and the awful truth of it seemed to smite her in her own face.

Madelon went up-stairs, and brushed and braided her black hair before her glass; but the face therein did not look like her own to her, and she felt all the time as if she were braiding and wreathing the hair around another's head. One of those deeds had she committed which lead a man to see suddenly the stranger that abides always in his flesh and in his own soul, and makes him realize that of all the millions of earth there is not one that he knows not better than his own self, nor whose face can look so strange to him in the light of his own actions.

Madelon put her red cloak over her shoulders as she might have put it on a lay-figure, and tied on her hood. Then she went down-stairs, out of the house to the barn, and put the side-saddle on the roan mare.

Not another woman in the village, and scarcely a man except the Hautville sons, would have dared to ride this roan, with the backward roll of her vicious eyes and her wicked, flat-laid ears; but Madelon Hautville could not be thrown.

The mare, when she was saddled, danced an iron-bound dance in the barn bay, but Madelon bade her stand still, and she obeyed, her nostrils quivering, the breath coming from them in a snort of smoke, and every muscle under her roan hide vibrating.

Then Madelon placed her foot in the stirrup, and was in the saddle, pulling the bit hard against the jaw, and the mare shot out of the barn with a fierce lash-out of her heels and an upheaval of her gaunt roan flanks that threatened to dash the girl's head against the lintel of the door.

But Madelon knew with what she had to do, and she bent low in the saddle and passed out in safety. Then she spared not the mare for nigh three miles on the New Salem road. It was ten miles to New Salem, and it did not take long to reach it, riding a horse who went at times as if all the fiends were in chase, and often sprang out like a bow into the wayside bushes, and was off with a new spurt of vicious terror. It was still far from sundown when Madelon Hautville tied the roan outside the jail where Burr Gordon lay.

Burr was sitting in his cell, which was nothing but a rough chamber with whitewashed walls and a grated window. It was furnished with a bed, a table, and a chair. He had an inkstand and a great sheet of paper on the table, and he was writing a letter when the bolt shot and the jailer entered with Madelon Hautville.

Burr looked at her with a white, incredulous face. Then he started up and came forward, but Madelon did not look at him. She turned to the jailer, Alvin Mead. “I want to see him alone,” said she, imperatively.

“It's again my orders,” said the jailer. He was a great man, with an arm like a crow-bar. He was reputed to have used it as one many a time at a house-raising.

“I've got to see him alone!”

“He's in here on a charge of murder, and it's again my orders,” repeated Alvin Mead, like a parrot.

“I've got to see him alone!”

Alvin Mead looked at her irresolutely with his stupid light eyes; then all his great system of bone and muscle seemed to back out of the room before her. He shut the door after him, and they heard the bolt slide.

Madelon turned to Burr. “Tell them,” she gasped out—“tell them it was—I!”

Burr did not speak for a minute; he stood looking at her. “Perhaps I am not any too much of a man,” he said, slowly, at length, “but you ask me to be a good deal less of a man than I am.”

Madelon did not seem to hear him. “I have told them I did it! I have told them all,” said she, “but they won't believe me—they won't believe me! You must tell them.”

“I will die before I will tell them,” said Burr Gordon.

Madelon looked at his white face, which was set against hers like a rock; then she gave a great cry and fell down on her knees before him. “Tell them,” she moaned, “or they will hang you—they will hang you, Burr!”

“Let them hang me, then!”

“Tell them; they won't believe me!”

Burr caught hold of her two arms and raised her to her feet. “See here, Madelon,” said he, “don't you know—”

She looked at him dumbly.

“Don't you know—I would not tell them if they would, but—I might tell them until I was gray, and they would not believe me!”

Madelon cried out sharply, as if she in her turn had been struck to the heart.

“It is true,” Burr said, quietly.

“Then if he dies without telling, there is no way of—saving you—”

Burr shook his head.

“The knife—how—came your knife there instead of Richard's?”

Burr smiled.

Bluish shadows came around Madelon's dark eyes and her mouth. She gasped for breath as she spoke. “I—have—killed you, then,” said she. Suddenly she put up her white, stiffly quivering lips to Burr's. “Kiss me!” she cried out. “I beg you to give me the kiss that I might have killed you for last night!”

Burr bent down and kissed her, and she threw her arms around him and pressed his head to her bosom. “They shall not,” she cried out, fiercely—“they shall not hang you! I will make them believe me! Don't be afraid, don't be afraid, Burr.”

“Madelon,” Burr said, huskily, “I have been double-faced and false to you, but, as God is my witness, I'm glad I've got the chance to suffer in your stead.”

“You shall not! They shall believe I did it. I will make Lot Gordon tell. He shall tell before he dies!”

The bolt slid back, and Alvin Mead's great bulk darkened the doorway. Madelon turned her face towards him, with her arms still clasping Burr and holding his head to her bosom. “This man is innocent!” she cried out, with a fierce gesture of protection, as if she were defending her young instead of her false lover. “I tell you he is innocent—you must let him go! I am the one who stabbed Lot Gordon!”

Alvin Mead stared; his heavy pink jaw lopped.

“I tell you, you must let him go!” She released Burr from her arms and gave him a push towards the door. “Go out,” she said; “I am the one to stay here.”

But Alvin Mead collected and brought about his great body with a show of lumbering fists. “Come,” said he, “this ain't a-goin to do. We can't have no sech work as this, young woman. It's time you went.”

“Let him go, I tell you!” commanded Madelon, confronting him fiercely. “I am going to stay.”

“They won't let you come again if you don't go quietly now,” Burr whispered, and he laid his hand on her nervous shoulder.

“I ruther guess we won't have no sech doin's again,” said Alvin Mead, with sulky assent.

“You must go, Madelon.”

Madelon tied on her hood. Her white face had its rigid, desperate look again.

“I will make them believe me yet, and you shall be set free,” she said to Burr, with a stern nod, and passed out, while Alvin Mead stood back to give her passage, watching her with sullen and wary eyes. He was, in truth, half afraid of her.

Chapter VI

When Madelon, returning from New Salem, came in sight of her home the first thing which she noticed was her father in the yard in front of the house.

David Hautville's great figure stood out in the dusk of the snowy landscape like a giant's. He was motionless. The roan mare's gallop had evidently struck his ear some time before, and he knew that Madelon was returning. He did not even look her way as she drew nearer, but when she rode into the yard he made a swift movement forward and seized the mare by the bridle. She reared, but Madelon sat firm, with wretched, undaunted eyes upon her father. David Hautville's eyes blazed back at her out of the whiteness of his wrath.

“Where have you been?” he demanded, in a thick voice.

“To New Salem.”

“What for?”

“To see Burr, and beg him to confess that I killed Lot.”

“You didn't.”

“I did.”

“Fool!” David Hautville jerked the bridle so fiercely that the mare reared far back again. He jerked her down to her feet, and she made a vicious lunge at him, but he shunted her away.

“I'll fasten you into your chamber,” he shouted, “if this work goes on! I'll stop your making a fool of yourself.”

“It is Lot Gordon that is making fools of you all,” said Madelon, in a hard, quiet voice.

“Did Burr Gordon say he didn't stab him?” cried her father.

“No; he wouldn't own it. He is trying to shield me.”

“He did it himself, and he'll hang for it.”

“No, he won't hang for what I did while I draw the breath of life. I've got the strength of ten in me. You don't know me, if I am your daughter.” Madelon freed her bridle with a quick movement, and the mare flew forward into the barn.

David Hautville stood looking after her in utter fury and bewilderment. Her last words rang in his ears and seemed true to him. He felt as if he did not know his own daughter. This awakening and lashing into action, by the terrible pressure of circumstances, of strange ancestral traits which he had himself transmitted was beyond his simple comprehension. He shook his head with a fierce helplessness and went into the barn.

“Go in and get the supper,” he ordered, “and I'll take care of the mare.”

As Madelon came out of the stall he grasped her roughly by the arm and peered sharply into her face. The thought seized him that she must surely not be in her right mind—that Burr's treatment of her and his danger had turned her brain. “Be you crazy, Madelon?” he asked, in his straightforward simplicity, and there was an accent of doubt and pity in his voice.

“No, father,” she replied, “I am not crazy. Let me go.”

She broke away from him and was out of the barn door, but suddenly she turned and came running back. The sudden softness in his voice had stirred the woman in her to weakness. She went close to her father, and threw up her arms around his great neck, and clung to him, and sobbed as if she would sob her soul away, and pleaded with him as for her life.

“Father!” she cried—“father, help me! Believe me! Tell them I did it! Tell them it is true! Don't let them hang Burr. Help me to save him, father! Don't let them! Save him! Oh, you will save him, father? You will? Tell me, father—tell me, tell me!” Madelon's voice rose into a wild shriek.

A sudden conviction of his solution of the matter and of his own astuteness came over David Hautville's primitive masculine intelligence. His daughter was wellnigh distraught with her lover's faithlessness and his awful crime and danger. She was to be watched and guarded lest she make a further spectacle of herself; but treated softly as might be, for she was naught but a woman, and liable to mischievous ailments of nerve and brain. David pressed his daughter's dark head with his hard, tender hand against his shoulder, then forced her gently away from him.

“It'll be all right,” said he, soothingly—“it'll be all right. Don't you worry.”

“Father, you will?”

“I'll fix it all right. Don't you worry.”

“Father, you promise?”

“I'll do everything I can. Don't you worry, Madelon. You'd better go in and get supper now. I'll go along to the house with you and get the lantern. It's getting too dark to do the work here.”

David drew his daughter along, out of the barn, across the snowy yard to the house, she pleading frantically all the way, he soothing her with his sudden wisdom of assent and evasion.

The hearth fire was blazing high when Madelon entered the kitchen. The red glare of it was on her white face, upturned to her father's with one last pleading of despair. She clutched his arm and shook his great frame to and fro.

“Father, promise me you'll go over to New Salem to-night and tell them to set him free and take me instead! Father!”

“We'll see about it, Madelon,” answered David Hautville. There was a tone in his voice which she had never heard before. It might have come unconsciously to himself from some memory, so old that it was itself forgotten, of his dead wife's voice over the child in her cradle. Some echo of it might have yet lingered in the old father's soul, through something finer than his instinct for sweet sounds from human throat and viol—through his ear for love.

“Get the supper now, and we'll see about it,” said David Hautville. He began fumbling with clumsy fingers, all unused to women's gear, at the string of this daughter's cloak; but she pulled herself away from him suddenly, and the old hard lines came into her face. “We'll say no more about it,” said she. She lit a candle quickly at the hearth fire, and was out of the room to put away her cloak and hood. Her father lighted his lantern slowly and went back to the barn, plodding meditatively through the snowy track, with the melting mood still strong upon him. He was disposed to carry matters now with a high and tender hand with the girl to bring her to reason, and he brought all his crude diplomacy to bear upon the matter.

When he reached the barn his son Eugene stood in the doorway. He had just come from the woods, and the smell of wounded cedar-trees was strong about him. He stood leaning upon his axe as if it were a staff. “Who's been out with the mare?” he asked.

“Your sister.”

“Where?”

“To New Salem.”

“To see him?”

David nodded grimly. His lantern cast a pale circle of light on the snow about them.

“About—that?”

“To get him to own up she did it.”

Eugene Hautville stared at his father, scowling his handsome dark brows. He was the most graceful mannered of all the Hautville sons, and by some accounted the best-looking.

“Is she crazy?” he said.

“No, she's a woman,” returned his father, with a strange accent of contempt and toleration.

“Did the coward lay it to her when she gave him the chance?” demanded Eugene.

“No; she said he wouldn't, to shield her.”

Eugene moved his axe suddenly; the lantern-light struck it, and there was a bright flash of sharp steel in their eyes. “Shield her!” he cried out, with an oath. “I wish I could meet him in the path once. I'd give him a taste before they put the rope 'round his neck, the lying murderer!”

David nodded his head in savage assent.

“What's going to be done with Madelon?” cried Eugene, fiercely.

“I've been thinking—” said his father, slowly.

“No sister of mine shall go about rolling herself in the dust at that fellow's feet if I can help it.”

“I've been thinking—would you lock her in her chamber a spell?”

“Lock Madelon in her chamber! She'd get out or she'd beat her brains out against the wall.”

“I don't know but she would,” assented David, perplexedly. “You can't count on a woman when they rise up. She might go away a spell.”

“Where?”

“We might send her somewhere.”

Eugene laughed. The roan mare was pawing in her stall. Now and then she pounded the floor with a clattering thud like an iron flail.

“How far do you suppose that mare would go if you tried to send her anywhere?” he asked.

“Maybe Madelon wouldn't go.”

“You'd have to halter the mare,” said Eugene, “and drag her half the way and stand from under, or she'd trample you down the other.” Eugene, although his words were strong, spoke quite softly, lowering his sweet tenor. From where they stood they could see Madelon moving to and fro behind the kitchen windows preparing supper.

“I don't know what to do,” said David, after a pause.

“Watch her,” returned Eugene, quietly.

“Watch her?”

“Yes. I've been under cover days before now watching for a pretty white fox or a deer I wanted.” Eugene laughed pleasantly.

“Will you?”

“I'll stay by the house to-morrow. She sha'n't go about accusing herself of murder to save the man that's jilted her if I can help it.” As he spoke Eugene's handsome face darkened again vindictively. He hated Burr Gordon for another reason of his own that nobody suspected.

Suddenly Abner Hautville came running into the yard. “Who is it there?” he called out. “Is that you, father? That you, Eugene? Hello!”

“Hello!” Eugene called back. “What's the matter?”

Abner come panting alongside. He had run from the village, and, vigorous as he was, breath came hard in the thin air. It was a very cold night.

“Where have they gone?” he demanded.

“Who?”

“Louis and Richard. Where have they gone?”

There was a ghastly look in Abner's face, in spite of the glowing red which the cold wind had brought to it. The other man seemed to catch it and reflect it in their own faces as they stared at him.

Eugene turned quickly to his father. “Aren't they in the house?” he asked.

“No, they ain't,” returned David, with his eyes still on Abner's face.

“Sure they ain't up chamber?”

“No; I was home a good half-hour before Madelon came. There wasn't a soul in the house, and nobody could have come home since without my knowing it.”

“They didn't come home this noon either,” said Eugene.

“Thought you said they'd gone to see to their traps on West Mountain?” David rejoined.

“Thought they had when they didn't come.” Eugene turned impatiently on Abner. “Where do you think they've gone—what do you mean by looking so?” he cried.

Abner dug his heel into the snow. “Don't know,” he returned, in a surly voice.

“What do you suspect, then? Good God! can't you speak out?”

Abner's features were heavier than his brother's—his speech and manner slower. He paused a second, even then; then he turned towards the house, and spoke, with his face away from them, with a curious directness and taciturnity. “Didn't go to the traps on West Mountain,” he said, then; “went there myself. They hadn't been there—no tracks; was home before father was to-night. Louis and Richard hadn't come. Went down to the village; hadn't been there.”

“You don't mean Louis and Richard have run away?” demanded David.

“Both their guns and their powder-horns and shot-bags are gone,” said Abner.

“They would have taken them anyway,” said Louis.

“The chest in Louis's chamber is unlocked and the money he kept in the till is gone, and his fiddle is gone, and the cider-brandy and wormwood bottle to bathe his arm with, and two shoulders of pork out of the cellar, and a sack of potatoes, and the blankets off his and Richard's beds are gone too,” said Abner. He began to move towards the house.

His father made a bound after him and grasped his arm. “What do you mean?” he cried out. “What do you think they've run away for?”

“Know as much as I do,” replied Abner. He wrenched his arm away and strode on towards the house. Then David Hautville and his son Eugene stood looking at each other with a surmise of horror growing in their eyes.

“What does he mean?” David whispered, hoarsely.

Eugene shook his head.

Presently Eugene went into the barn and fell to feeding the roan mare, and David plunged heavily back to the house. He and Abner sat one on each side of the fire and furtively watched Madelon preparing supper.

She spoke never a word. Her red lips were a red line of resolution. Her despairing eyes were fixed upon her work without a glance for either of them.

However, when supper was set on the table, and she had blown the horn at the door and waited, and nobody else came, she turned with sudden life upon her father and her brothers, who had already begun to taste the smoking hasty-pudding. “Where are the others?” she cried out, shrilly. “Where are Louis and Richard?”

The men glanced at one another under sullen eyelids, but nobody answered. “Where are they?” she repeated.

“You know as much about it as we do,” Eugene said, then, in his soft voice.

Madelon stood with wild eyes flashing from one to another. Then she gave a sudden spring out of the room, and they heard her swift feet on the chamber-stairs. The men ate their hasty-pudding, bending their brows over it as if it were a witches' mess instead of their ordinary home fare.

Madelon came back so rapidly that she seemed to fly over the stairs. They scarcely heard the separate taps of her feet. She burst into the room and faced them in a sort of fury. “They have gone!” she gasped out. “Louis and Richard have gone! Where are they?”

David Hautville slowly shook his head. Then he took another spoonful of pudding. The brothers bent with stern assiduity over their bowls.

“You have hid them away!” shrieked Madelon. “You have hid them away lest Louis own that he saw blood on my hand, and Richard that he gave me his knife! What have you done with them?”

Not one of the three men spoke. They swallowed their pudding.

“Father! Abner! Eugene!” said Madelon, “tell me what you have done with my brothers, who can testify that I killed Lot Gordon, and save Burr?”

David Hautville wiped his mouth on his sleeve, rose up, and took his daughter firmly by the arm.

“We know no more what has become of your brothers than you do,” said he. “If they have gone away for the reason you say, your old father would be the first to bring them back, if you were guilty as you say, daughter of mine though you be. But we know well enough, wherever your brothers have gone, and for whatever cause they have gone, that you have done nothing worse then go daft, as women will, to shield a fellow that's used you ill. You shall put us to no more shame while I am your father and you under my roof. Abner, fill up a bowl with the pudding.”

Madelon's face was deathly white and full of rebellion as she looked up in her father's, but she held herself still with a stern dignity and did not struggle. David Hautville's will was up. His hand on her soft arm was like a vise of steel. The memories of her childhood were strong upon her. She knew of old that there was no appeal, and was too proud to contend where she must yield.

“Take the bowl,” said her father, when Abner extended it filled with the steaming pudding—“take the bowl, and go you to your chamber. Eat your supper, and get in to your bed and stay there till morning.”

Madelon still looked at her father with that same look of speechless but unyielding rebellion. She did not stir to take the bowl or go to her chamber.

“Do as I bid ye!” ordered her father, in a great voice.

Madelon took the bowl from her brother's hand and went out of the room as she was bid; and yet as she went they all knew that there was no yielding in her.

Chapter VII

The next morning Madelon came down-stairs as usual and prepared breakfast. When it was ready the family sat up to the table and ate silently and swiftly. No one addressed a word to Madelon. After breakfast David and his son Abner put on their leather jackets and their fur caps, and set forth for the woods with their axes, but Eugene lounged gracefully over to the hearth and sat down on the settle, and began reading his Shakespeare book. Eugene was the only one of the Hautvilles who ever read books. He studied faithfully the few in the house—the Shakespeare, the Pilgrim's Progress, Milton, and Gulliver's Travels. The others wondered at him. They could not understand how any one who could handle a gun or a musical instrument could lay finger on a book. “Made-up things,” said Abner once, with a scornful motion towards Shakespeare.

“No more made-up than fugue,” retorted Eugene, hotly; but they all cried out on him.

This morning Madelon cast one quick glance at him as he sauntered over to the settle with his book. Then she did not look his way again. She worked quietly, setting the kitchen to rights.

The day was very cold; the light in the room was dim and white, the windows were coated so thickly with the hoar-frost. Eugene kept stirring the fire and adding sticks as he read.

Finally, Madelon had finished her work in the kitchen, and went up-stairs. Then Eugene arose reluctantly, went out into the cold entry, and stood by the door with his book in hand. Madelon, passing across the landing above, looked down and saw him standing there, and knew that what she suspected was true—that her brother was mounting guard over her lest she leave the house.

She finished her work in the chamber, and came down-stairs with some knitting-work in hand. She seated herself quietly in her own cushioned rocking-chair, and fell to work with yarn and clicking needles, like any peaceful housewife. She knitted and Eugene read, bending his handsome dark face, smiling with pleasure, over his Shakespeare book. This fierce winter day he was reading “A Midsummer-Night's Dream,” and letting his fancy revel with Shakespeare's fairies in an enchanted summer wood. He was, however, alert as a watch-dog. He could at an instant's warning leave that delicate and dainty crew and those flowery shores, and intercept his sister, should she attempt to pass him and escape from the house.

Still, his alertness all came to naught, for Madelon, like some fleeing fox, took a sudden turn which no canny hunter could have anticipated. She sat somewhat away from the hearth and well at Eugene's back. He would have asked her why she did not draw nearer the fire and if she were not cold had he not feared to encounter a sulky humor. He could not see the lengths of linen cloth, which she herself had spun and woven, lying in a great heap on the floor, half at her back, half under her petticoats. However, could he have seen it he would have thought of it merely as some mysterious domestic and feminine proceeding about which he neither knew nor cared to know anything.

Madelon, as she knitted, ever measured the distance between her brother and herself with her great black eyes, training her nerves and muscles for what she had to do as she would have trained a bow and arrow.

Eugene turned a leaf in his Shakespeare book. Madelon made a leap, so soft and swift that it seemed like an onslaught of Silence itself, and he was smothered and wound about and entangled in folds of linen as if it had been in truth his winding-sheet. He struggled as best he might against his linen bands, and cried out as angrily as he could for the linen that bound his mouth and his eyes, but he could not release himself. Eugene was strong and lithe, but Madelon was nearly as strong as he at any time; and now the great tension of her nerves seemed to inform all her muscles with the strength of steel wire.

Eugene sat bound hard and fast to the settle, with his face swathed like a mummy's, with only enough space clear for breath. “Let me go, or I'll—” he threatened, in his smothered tone.

Madelon made no reply. She watched him struggle to be sure that he could not free himself. Then she went out of the room. Eugene called after her in a choke of fury, but she spoke not a word.

Up-stairs she hastened to her own chamber, and put on her red cloak and hood, and was down the stairs again, out the door, and hurrying up the road to the village. From time to time she glanced behind her to be sure that her brother had not freed himself, and was not in pursuit; then she sped on faster. The road was glare with ice, but she did not slow her pace for that. She was as sure-footed as a hare. She kept her arms close to her sides under her red cloak, and did not pause until she came out on the village street where the houses were thick. Then she went at a rapid walk, still glancing sharply behind her to see if she were followed, until she came to Parson Fair's house. She went up the front walk, between the rows of ice-coated box, and up the stone steps under the stately columned porch, and raised the knocker and let it fall with sharp impetus. The door opened speedily a little way, and Parson Fair himself stood there, his pale, stern old face framed in the dark aperture. He bowed with gentle courtesy and bade her good-morning, and Madelon courtesied hurriedly and spoke out her errand with no preface.

“Can I see your daughter, sir?” said she.

Parson Fair looked at Madelon's white face, touched on the cheeks and lips with feverish red, at her set mouth and desperate eyes. The story of her connection with the Gordon tragedy had not penetrated to his study, neither did he know how Burr had forsaken her for his Dorothy; but he saw something was amiss with her, although he was not well versed in the signs of a woman's face. Parson Fair, moreover, felt somewhat of interest in this Madelon Hautville, for he had a decorously restrained passion for sweet sounds which she had often gratified. Many a Sabbath day had he sat in his beetling pulpit and striven to keep his mind fixed upon the spirit of the hymn alone, in spite of his leaping pulses, when Madelon's great voice filled the meeting-house. It was probable that he also, notwithstanding his Christian grace, shared somewhat the popular sentiments towards these musical and Bohemian Hautvilles; yet he looked with a dignified kindness at the girl.

“I trust you are not ill,” he said, without answering her question as to whether she might see Dorothy.

Madelon did not act as if she heard what he said. “Can I see your daughter, sir?” she repeated. She cast an anxious glance over her shoulder for fear Eugene might appear in the road.

Parson Fair still eyed her with perplexity. “I believe Dorothy is ill in her chamber,” he said, hesitatingly. “I do not know—”

Madelon gave a dry sob. “I beg you to let me see her for a minute, sir,” she gasped out, “for the love of God. It is life and death!”

Parson Fair looked shocked and half alarmed. He had not had to do with women like this, who spoke with such fervor of passion. His womankind had swathed all their fiercer human emotions with shy decorum and stern modesty, as Turkish women swathe their faces with veils.

Madelon, still under the fear of Eugene, pressed inside the door as she spoke, and he stood aside half involuntarily. “I beg you to let me see her,” she repeated. She looked at the stately wind of the stairs up to the second floor, as if she were minded to ascend without bidding to Dorothy's chamber.

“She is ill in her chamber,” the Parson said again, with a kind of forbidding helplessness.

“I would see her only for a minute. I beg you to let me, sir. It is life and death, I tell you—it is life and death!”

Whether Parson Fair motioned her to ascend, or whether he simply stood aside to allow her to pass, he never knew, but Madelon was up the winding stairs with a swirl of her cloak, as if the wind had caught it. Parson Fair followed her, and motioned her to the south front chamber, and was about to rap on the door when it was flung open violently, and the great black princess stood there, scowling at them.

“I have a guest here for your mistress,” said Parson Fair; but the black woman blocked his way, speaking fast in her wrathful gibberish.

However, at a stately gesture from her master she stood aside, and he held the door open, and Madelon entered. “You had better not remain long, to tire her,” said the parson, and closed the door. Immediately the uncouth savage voice was raised high again, and quelled by the parson's calm tone. Then there was a great settling of a heavy body close to the threshold. The black woman had thrown herself at the sill of her darling's door, to keep watch, like a faithful dog.

Madelon Hautville, when she entered Dorothy Fair's room, had her mind not been fixed upon its one end, which was above all such petty details of existence, might well have looked about her. No such dainty maiden bower was there in the whole village as this. Madelon's own chamber, carpetless and freezing cold, with its sparse furniture and scanty sweep of white curtains across the furred windows which filled the room with the blue-white light of frost, was desolation to it.

A great fire blazed on Dorothy Fair's chamber hearth. The red glow of it was over the whole room, and the frost on the windows was melting. Curtains of a soft blue-and-white stuff, said to have been brought from overseas, hung at Dorothy's windows and between the high posts of her bed. She had also her little rocking-chair and footstool frilled and cushioned with it. There was a fine white matting on her floor, and a thick rug with a basket of flowers wrought on it beside her bed. The high white panel-work around Dorothy's mantel was carved with curving garlands and festoons of ribbon and flowers, and on the shelf stood tall china vases and bright candlesticks. Dorothy's dressing-table had a petticoat of finest dimity, trimmed with tiny tassels. Above it hung her fine oval mirror, in a carved gilt frame. Upon the table were scattered silver and ivory things and glass bottles, the like of which Madelon had never seen. The room was full of that mingled perfume of roses and lavender which was always about Dorothy herself.

The counterpane on Dorothy's bed was all white and blue, and quilted in a curious fashion, and her pillows were edged with lace. In the midst of this white-and-blue nest, her slender little body half buried in her great feather-bed, her lovely yellow locks spreading over her pillow, lay Dorothy Fair when Madelon entered. She half raised herself, and stared at her with blue, dilated eyes, and shrank back with a little whimper of terror when she came impetuously to her bedside.

“You don't believe it,” Madelon said, with no preface.

Dorothy stared at her, trembling. “You mean—”

“I mean you don't believe he killed him! You don't believe Burr Gordon killed his cousin Lot!”

Dorothy sank weakly back on her pillows. Great tears welled up in her blue eyes and rolled down her soft cheeks. “They saw him there,” she sobbed out, “and they found his knife. Oh, I didn't think he was so wicked!”

Madelon caught her by one slender arm hard, as if she would have shaken her. “You believe it!” she cried out. “You believe that Burr did it—you!”

“They—saw—him—there,” moaned Dorothy, with a terrified roll of her tearful eyes at Madelon's face.

“Saw him there! What if they did see him there? What if the whole town saw him? What if you saw him? What if you saw him strike the blow with your own eyes? Wouldn't you tear them out of your own head before you believed it? Wouldn't you cut your own tongue out before you'd bear witness against him?”

Dorothy sobbed convulsively.

“I would,” said Madelon.

Dorothy hid her face away from her in the pillow.

Madelon laid her hand on her fair head, and turned it with no gentle hand. “Listen to me now,” she said. “You've got to listen. You've got to hear what I say. You ought to believe without being told, without knowing anything about it, that he's innocent, if you're a woman and love him; but I'm going to tell you. Burr Gordon didn't kill his cousin Lot. I did!”

Dorothy gave a faint scream and shrank away from her.

“I did!” repeated Madelon. “Now do you believe he's innocent, when somebody else has told you?”

Dorothy's face was white as her pillows, her eyes big with terror. There was a soft thud against her door. The black woman was keeping arduous watch.

“You couldn't!” Dorothy gasped out.

“I could! Look at my hands; they are as strong as a man's.”

“You—couldn't!”

“I could, and I did.”

Dorothy shook her head in hysterical doubt.

“Listen,” said Madelon—“listen. I'll tell you why I did it, Dorothy Fair. Burr Gordon had been with me a little before he went with you. Perhaps you knew it. If you did, I am not blaming you—he's got taking ways, you couldn't help it; and I am not blaming him—he's a man, and you're fairer complexioned than I am. But I was fool enough to be mad without any good reason—you understand I am not saying anything against him, Dorothy Fair—when I saw him with you at the ball. He had a right to take anybody to the ball that he chose. It was naught to me, but I was mad. I have a quick temper. And I started home when that young man from Kingston offered to fiddle for the dancing after you and Burr went out; and my brother Richard made me take his knife for fear I might meet stragglers, and I had it open under my cloak. And when I got to that lonely part of the road, after the turn, I saw somebody coming, and I thought it was Burr. He walked like him. And I looked away—I did not want to see his face; and when I came up to him the first thing I knew he threw his arm around me and kissed me, and—something seemed to leap up in me and I struck with Richard's knife. And—then he fell down, and I looked and it was not Burr—it was his cousin Lot. And—then Burr came, and we heard whistling, and others were coming, and he made me run, and the others came up and found him; and now they say he did it and not I. It was I who stabbed Lot Gordon, Dorothy Fair!”

“It was Burr's knife, with his initials cut in the handle, that they found,” said Dorothy, with a kind of piteous doggedness. There was in this fair little maiden the same power of adherence to a mental attitude which her father had shown in his religious tenets. Wherever the men and women of this family stood they were fixed beyond their own capability of motion.

Madelon gave a bewildered sigh. “I know not how that was,” said she, “unless—” a red flush mounted over her whole face. “No, he would not have done that for me,” she said, as if to herself.

A red flush on Dorothy's face seemed to respond to that on Madelon's. “You think he put his knife there to take suspicion from you?” she cried out, quickly.

Madelon shook her head. “I don't know about the knife,” she said, “but I know I stabbed Lot Gordon.”

“He would not have done that,” said Dorothy, with troubled, angry blue eyes on her face. “He would have thought of—others. He never changed the knife, Madelon Hautville!”

“I know nothing about the knife,” repeated Madelon, “but Burr Gordon did not kill his cousin.”

“He was there, and it was his knife,” said Dorothy. There was now a curious indignation in her manner. It was almost as if she preferred to believe her lover guilty of murder rather than unduly solicitous for her rival.

Madelon Hautville turned upon her with a kind of fierce solemnity. “Dorothy Fair,” said she, “look at me!” and the soft, blue-eyed face, full of that gentle unyielding which is the firmest of all, looked up at her from the pillows—“Dorothy Fair, did that man, who's locked up over there in jail in New Salem, for a crime he's innocent of, ever kiss you?”

Madelon's face seemed to wax stiff and white. She looked like one who bared her breast for a mortal hurt as she spoke. Dorothy went pink to the roots of her yellow hair and the frill on her nightgown. She made an angry shamed motion of her head, which might have signified anything.

“And you can believe this thing of him after that!” said Madelon, with a look of despairing scorn. “He has kissed you, Dorothy Fair, and you can think he has committed a murder!”

Dorothy gasped. “They said—” she began again.

“They said! Are you a woman, Dorothy Fair, and don't you know that the man you love enough to let him kiss you should do no wrong in your eyes, or else it's a shame to you, and you should kill him to wipe it out?” Dorothy shrank away from her in the bed, her frightened blue eyes staring at her over her shoulder. “My God! don't you know,” said Madelon, “the man you love is yourself? When you believe in his guilt you believe in your own; when you strike him for it you strike yourself. Don't you know that, Dorothy Fair?”

Dorothy looked at her, all white and trembling. She gave a half-sob. Suddenly Madelon's tone changed. “Don't be afraid,” said she. “I'm different from you. I don't wonder he liked you better. It's no blame to him. I know you care about him. You don't believe he did it.”

“I don't know,” sobbed Dorothy. The door opened a crack, and the black woman's watchful eyes appeared.

“Oh, you do know, you do know! I tell you, I did it—I! Can't you believe me? I'm a wicked woman, and I love anybody I love in a different way from any that a woman as good as you are can. I did it, Dorothy, and not Burr! He mustn't suffer for it. We must see him, you and I together! Don't you believe me?”

“I don't—know,” sobbed Dorothy. The dark face appeared quite fully in the door. Madelon cast a quick glance about the room. Dorothy's pretty Bible, with a blue-silk-ribbon marker hanging from it, lay on her dimity dressing-table. Madelon sprang across and got it. The black woman stood in the doorway, muttering to herself. She looked all ready to spring to Dorothy's defence. Madelon did not notice her at all. She went close to Dorothy, put the Bible on the bed, and laid her right hand upon it.

“I swear upon this Holy Book,” said she, “that this hand of mine is the one that stabbed Lot Gordon. I swear, and I call God to witness, and may I be struck dead as I speak if what I say is not true. Now do you believe what I say, Dorothy Fair?”

Dorothy looked at her and the Bible in bewildered terror. She nodded.

Chapter VIII

Something like joy came into Madelon's face. “Then we will save him, you and I!” she cried out. “We will save him together! He shall not be hung! He shall be set free! They shall let him out of jail to-day, and put me there instead. We will save him! He would not own that I was guilty and he innocent; Lot would not own it, nor my brother Richard, but now—we will save him—now!”

“How?” asked Dorothy, feebly.

“He will own it to you. Burr will own it to you if you go and plead with him. He can't help owning it to you. And then you shall go to Lot, and when you ask him for your sake, that you may marry Burr, if he knows Burr has told you, and does not care about me, he will speak. He will be sure to speak for you. Come!”

Dorothy raised herself on one elbow and stared at Madelon, her yellow hair falling about her fair startled face. “Where?” said she.

“With me to New Salem.”

“To New Salem?”

“Yes, to New Salem—to see Burr.”

“But I am ill, and the doctor has bid me stay in bed. I have been ill ever since the ball with a headache and fever.”

“You talk about headache and fever when Burr is there in prison! I tell you if my two feet were cut off I would walk to him on the stumps to set him free!”

“How can I go?” said Dorothy. Her blue eyes kindled a little under Madelon's fiery zeal.

“We will take your father's horse and sleigh.”

“But the horse is gone lame, and has not been used for a month.”

“I will get one from Dexter Beers at the tavern,” said Madelon, promptly. “I will lead him over here and harness him into the sleigh.”

“My father will not let me go,” said Dorothy.

“He is a minister of the gospel—he will let his daughter go to save a life.”

“I tell you he will not,” said Dorothy. “I know my father better than you. He will not let me go out when I am ill. It is freezing cold, too. If I go I must go without his knowledge and consent.”

“I am going without my father's,” said Madelon, shortly, “and I go at a greater cost than that, too.”

“It's the second time I have deceived and disobeyed my father in a week's time,” Dorothy said.

“You talk about your father when it is Burr—Burr—that's at stake!” Madelon cried out. “What is your father to Burr if you love him? That ought to go before anything else. It says so in your Bible—it says so in your Bible, Dorothy Fair!”

Dorothy, with her innocent, frightened eyes fixed upon the other girl's passionate face, as if she were being led by her into unknown paths, put back the coverlet and thrust one little white foot out of bed. Then swiftly the black woman, who had entered the room, backed against the door as stiffly as a sentinel, darted forward, and would have thrust her mistress into bed again, making uncouth protests the while, had not Dorothy motioned her away with a gentle dignity, which was hers for use when she chose.

“Go down-stairs, if you please,” said she, “and see if my father is in his study. If he is in there, and busy over his sermon, go to the barn, and drag out the sleigh for us.”

Dorothy, white and fair as an angel, in her straight linen nightgown, stood out on the floor, in front of her great black guardian, who made again as though she would seize her and force her back, and pleaded with her in a thick drone, like an anxious bee, not to go.

“Do as I bid you!” said Dorothy, and glided past her to her dimity dressing-table, and began combing out her yellow hair.

The black woman went out, muttering.

“If my father is in his study on the north side of the house, and busy over his sermon, we can get away; otherwise we cannot,” said Dorothy, combing the thick tress over her shoulder.

Madelon went to a south window of the room and looked out. She could see the barn, and across the road, farther down, the tavern. She watched while Dorothy bound up her hair, and soon she saw the black woman run, with a low crouch of her great body like a stealthy animal, across the yard.

“Your father is in his study,” Madelon said, quickly. “I will go over to the tavern for a horse if yours is too lame.”

“He can scarce stand,” said Dorothy. Her soft voice trembled; she trembled all over—then was still with nervous rigors. Bright pink spots were on her cheeks. A certain girlish daring was there in this gentle maiden for youthful love and pleasure, else she had not stolen away that night to the ball, but very little for tragic enterprise. And, moreover, her fine sense of decorum and womanly pride had always served her mainly in the place of courage, which she lacked.

Sorely afraid was Dorothy Fair, if the truth were told, to go with this passionate girl, who had declared to her face she had done murder, to visit a man who she still half believed, with her helpless tenacity of thought, was a murderer also. The love she had hitherto felt for him was eclipsed by terror at the new image of him which her fearful fancy had conjured up and could not yet dismiss, in spite of Madelon's assurances. She was, too, really ill, and her delicate nerves were still awry from the shock they had received the night of the ball. Parson Fair had been sternly indignant, and his daughter had quailed before him, and then had come the news concerning Burr. Sage tea, and hot foot-baths, and the doctor's nostrums had not cured her yet. Her very spirit trembled and fluttered at this undertaking; but she could not withstand this fierce and ardent girl who upbraided her with the cowardice and distrust of her love. Instinctively she tried to raise her sentiment to the standard of the other's and believe in Burr.

Madelon paused a second as she went out, and gave a strange, scrutinizing glance at her.

“Why do you not wear your blue-silk quilted hood with the swan's-down trimming?” said she. “It becomes you, and it is warm over your ears.”

“Yes, I will,” said Dorothy, looking at her wonderingly.

Madelon went softly out of the house, and ran across and down the road to the tavern. Dexter Beers, the landlord, was just going around the wide sweep of drive to the stable with a meal-sack over his shoulder. No one else was in sight; it was so cold there were no loafers about. Madelon ran after him, and overtook him before he reached the stable door.

“Can you let me take a horse?” said she, abruptly.

Dexter Beers looked slowly around at her with a quick roll of a black eye in a massive face. He had an enormous bulk, which he moved about with painful sidewise motions. His voice was husky.

“What d'ye want a horse for?” said he.

“I want it to put in Parson Fair's sleigh.”

“What for?”

“To take Dorothy to ride.”

“Parson's horse lame yet?”

Madelon nodded.

“Where's yours?”

“I can't have him.”

Dexter Beers still moved on with curious lateral twirls of his shoulders and heaves of his great chest, with its row of shining waistcoat buttons.

“Pooty cold day for a sleigh-ride,” he observed, with a great steam of breath.

“I'll pay you well for the horse,” said Madelon, in a hard voice. She followed him into the stable. He heaved the meal-sack from his shoulder to the floor with a grunt. Another man came forward with a peck measure in his hand. He was young, with a frosty yellow mustache. He had gone to school with Madelon and knew her well, but he looked at her with uncouth shyness without speaking. Then he began unfastening the mouth of the sack.

Madelon stepped forward impatiently towards the horse-stalls. There were the relay of coach-horses, great grays and bays, champing their feed, getting ready for their sure-footed rushes over the mountain roads when the coaches came in. She passed them by with sharp glances.

A man whose face was purplish red with cold was out in the rear of the stable, rubbing down a restive bay with loud “whoas,” and now and then a stronger word and a hard twitch at the halter. He looked curiously at Madelon as she walked up to one of the stalls.

“Better look out for them heels!” he called out, as she drew nearer. She paid no heed, but went straight into the stall, untied the horse, and began to back him out. “Hi, there!” the man shouted, and Dexter Beers and the young man came hurrying up. “Better look out for that gal—I believe she's gone crazy!” he called out. “I can't leave this darned beast—she'll get kicked to death if she don't look out. That old white won't stan' a woman in the stall. Whoa, there! whoa, darn ye! Stan' still!”

“Hullo, what ye doin' of?” demanded Dexter Beers, coming up.

Madelon calmly backed the horse out of his stall. “I want to hire this horse,” said she, holding his halter with a firm hand.

“That horse?”

“Yes. I'll pay you whatever you ask.”

Dexter Beers stared at her and the horse dubiously. “Jest as soon set a woman to drivin' the devil as that old white,” volunteered the man who was cleaning the bay. The young man stood gaping with wonder.

“Can I have this horse or not?” demanded Madelon. Her black eyes flashed imperiously at Dexter Beers. Her small brown hand held the halter of the old white with a grasp like steel.

“Dunno 'bout your drivin' that horse,” said Dexter Beers. “'Fraid you'll get run away with. Better take another.”

“Isn't this horse the fastest you've got on a short stretch?”

“S'pose he is, but I dunno 'bout a woman's drivin' of him.”

Madelon looked as if she were half minded to spring upon the back of the old white and settle the matter summarily. She fairly quivered with impatience.

“A woman who can drive David Hautville's roan can drive this horse, and you know it,” said she. She moved forward as she spoke, leading the high-stepping old white, and Dexter Beers stood aside.

“Well, David Hautville's roan is nigh a match for this one,” he grunted, hesitatingly, “but then ye know your own better. Hadn't ye better—”

But the old white was out of the stable at a trot, with Madelon running alongside.

“Don't ye want a man to hitch him up?” Dexter Beers called after her; but she was out of hearing.

“If the gal's ekal to drivin' that horse, she's ekal to hitchin' of him up,” said the man who was cleaning the bay. “If a gal wants to drive, let her hitch. Ye'd better let a woman go the whole figger when she gits started, just as ye'd better give an ugly cuss of a horse his head up hill an' down. It takes the mischief out of 'em quicker'n anything. Let her go it, Dexter—don't ye fret.”

“I don't want her breakin' any of the parson's daughter's bones with none of my horses,” said Dexter Beers, uneasily. “Wonder where the parson is?”

“Let 'em go it! They won't git smashed up, I guess,” said the other. “I've seen that gal of Hautville's with that mare of his'n. She kin drive most anythin' short of the devil, an' old white's got sense enough to know when he's well driv, ugly's he is. He wa'n't on the track for nothin'. He ain't no wuss, if he's as bad, as that roan mare. Let 'em go it!”

“Wonder what's to pay?” said the young man, who had not spoken before.

“Dunno,” said Dexter Beers. “Somethin's to pay—that girl acted queer.”

“S'pose she takes it hard 'bout Burr Gordon. He used to fool 'round her, I've heerd, afore he went courtin' the parson's gal.”

“Dunno—queer she's so thick with the parson's gal all of a sudden.”

“Lord, I wouldn't tech a gal that could git the upperhand of a horse like that roan mare with a ten-foot pole,” half soliloquized the man at work over the bay. “Wouldn't have her if she owned half the township, an' went down on her knees to me—darned if I would. Don't want no woman that kin make horse-flesh like that knuckle under. Guess a man wouldn't have much show; hev to take his porridge 'bout the way she wanted to make it. Whoa, there! stan' still, can't ye? Darned if I want nothin' to do with sech woman folks or sech horses as ye be.”

Dexter Beers moved laboriously out to the stable door and peered after Madelon, but she had disappeared in Parson Fair's yard. The white horse had gone up the road at a brisk trot, but she had easily kept pace with him. She also harnessed him into the sleigh with no difficulty. The animal seemed docile, and as if he were to belie his hard reputation. There was, however, a proud and nervous cant to his old white head, and he set his jaw stiffly against his bit.

Dorothy came out in her quilted silk pelisse and her blue hood edged with swan's-down, and got into the sleigh. The black woman was keeping watch at the parson's study door the while, but he never swerved from his hard application of the doctrines. The sleigh slipped noiselessly out of the yard and up the road, for Madelon had not put on the bells. The old white went rather stiffly and steadily for the first quarter-mile; then he made a leap forward with a great lift of his lean white flanks, and they flew.

Dorothy gave a terrified gasp. “Don't be frightened,” Madelon said. “It's the horse that used to beat everything in the county. He's old now, but when he gets warmed up he's the fastest horse around for a short stretch. He can't hold out long, but while he does he goes; and I want to get a good start. I want to strike the New Salem road as soon as I can.”

Madelon had a growing fear lest Eugene might have freed himself, and might ride the roan across by a shorter cut, and so intercept her at the turn into the New Salem road. He might easily suspect her of attempting to see Burr again. If she passed the turn first she could probably escape him if her horse held out; and, indeed, he might not think she had gone that way if he did not see her.

Dorothy held fast to the side of the sleigh, which seemed to rise from the track as they sped on. “Don't be frightened,” Madelon said again. “This is the only horse in town that can beat my father's on a short stretch, and I don't know that he can always, but I don't think he has been used, and father's was ridden hard yesterday. I can manage this one in harness better than I can father's. Don't be frightened.” But Dorothy's face grew pale as the swan's-down around it, and her great blue eyes were fixed fearfully upon the bounding heels and flanks of the old white race-horse.

Madelon strained her eyes ahead as they neared the turn of the New Salem road. There was nobody in sight. Then she glanced across the fields at the right. Suddenly she swung out the reins over the back of the old white, and hallooed, and stood up in the sleigh.

Dorothy screamed faintly. “Sit still and hold on!” Madelon shouted. Dorothy shut her eyes. It seemed to her she was being hurled through space. Her slender body swung to and fro against the sleigh as she clung frantically to it.

Eugene Hautville, on the roan, was coming at a mad run across the open field on the right towards the turn of the road. It seemed for a second as if Madelon would reach it before he did; but they met there, and the roan reared to a stop in the narrow road directly in front of the old white, who plunged furiously.

“Look out there!” shouted Eugene, as the sleigh tilted on the snow-crust. The old white's temper was up at this sudden check, but the woman behind him had a stronger will than he. She brought him to a straining halt, and then she spoke to her brother.

“You let us pass!” she said, sternly.

“Where are you going?” he demanded. He looked uneasily at Dorothy as he spoke. It was easy enough to see that she was a restraint upon him, and that fair, timid face in its blue hood held his indignation well in check.

“We are going to New Salem,” replied Madelon. “Let us pass.”

“I want to know what you are going for,” said Eugene; and he tried to speak with fire, but he still looked furtively at Dorothy.

Nobody had ever suspected how that lovely face of hers had been in his dreams, unless it had been for a time Dorothy herself. Nobody had noticed in meeting, of a Sabbath day long since, when Dorothy had first returned from her Boston school, sundry glances which had passed between a pair of soft blue eyes in the parson's pew and a pair of fiery black ones in the singing-seats.

Dorothy, half guiltily in those days, had arranged her curls and tied on her Sunday bonnets with a view to Eugene Hautville's eyes; and always, when she returned from meeting, had gone straight to her looking-glass, to be sure that she had looked fair in them. But nobody had ever known, and scarcely she herself.

She had come to think later that she had perhaps been mistaken, for never had Eugene made other advances to her than by those ardent glances; and Burr had come, and she had turned to him, and thought of Eugene Hautville only when he crossed her way, and then with a mixture of pique and shame. Never by any chance did her eyes meet his nowadays of a Sabbath day, and she listened coldly to his sweet tenor in the hymns. Now, suddenly, she looked straight up in his face and met his eyes, and a pink flush came into her white cheeks.

“Please to let us pass,” she said, in her gentle tone, which had yet a tincture of command in it. Any woman as fair as she, who has a right understanding of her looking-glass, has, however soft she may be, the instincts of a queen within her. She felt a proud resentment for her own old folly and for Eugene's old slighting of her, and indignation at his present attitude as she looked up at him with sudden daring.

Eugene threw back his head haughtily. “She wants to see Burr Gordon,” he thought, and would have died rather than let her think he would stand in the way of it. He jerked the roan aside, and seemed as if he would have been flung into the way-side bushes with her curving plunge.

“Pass, if you wish,” he said, with a graceful bend in his saddle, and was past them, riding the other way towards the village.

Chapter IX

When they reached the county buildings, the court-house and the jail, in New Salem, the old race-horse was still not nearly spent, although he breathed somewhat hard. When Madelon sprang out to blanket and tie him he seemed to vibrate to her touch like electric steel, and showed that the old fire had not yet died out of his nerves and muscles.

Poor Dorothy Fair's knees were weak under her as she got out of the sleigh. Her pretty face was pitiful, her sweet mouth drooping at the corners like a troubled child's.

Madelon looked at her sharply when they stood before the jail door waiting for admittance. “I have seen you wear a curl each side of your face outside your hood,” said she.

“I didn't think of it to-day,” Dorothy replied, with forlorn surprise.

Madelon went close to the other girl peremptorily, as if she had been her mother, pulled forward two soft curls from under her hood, and arranged them becomingly against the pale cheeks; and Dorothy submitted.

Alvin Mead opened the jail door, and his great face took on a forbidding scowl when he saw Madelon Hautville.

“Can't let ye in,” he said, gruffly. “Ain't a visitin' day.” He would have shut the door in their faces had not Madelon made a quick spring against it.

“I don't want to come in!” she cried. “I don't want to see him to-day. It's this lady who wants to see him.”

“Can't see nobody,” said Alvin Mead, filling up the door like a surly living wedge.

“You must let us see him,” persisted Madelon. “She's Parson Fair's daughter. She is going to marry Burr Gordon—she must see him.”

Alvin Mead shook his head stubbornly. Then Dorothy spoke, thrusting her fair face forward, and looking up at him with terrified, innocent pleading, like a child, and yet speaking with a gentle lady's authority. “I beg you to let me come in, only for a few moments,” said she. “I will not make you any trouble. I will come out directly when you bid me to.”

Alvin Mead looked at her a second, then at Madelon with rough inquiry. “Who did ye say she was?” he growled.

“Parson Fair's daughter, the lady that's going to marry Burr Gordon.”

“I can't let but one of ye see him, and she can't stay more'n ten minutes,” said Alvin Mead, and moved aside, and Madelon and Dorothy entered.

They followed Alvin Mead down the icy, dark corridor to Burr's cell door. He unlocked it, and bade Dorothy enter. He cast a forbidding look at Madelon. “I will stand here,” she said with a strange meekness, almost as if her heart were broken; but when the jailer prepared to follow Dorothy into Burr's cell she caught him by the arm and tried to force him back, and cried out sharply that he should let her see him alone. “She is the girl he is going to marry, I tell you!” she said. “Let them see each other alone. You cannot come between two like that when they are in such trouble.”

Alvin Mead looked at her a second irresolutely. Then he stepped back in the corridor and locked the cell door. “That the gal? Thought ye was the one,” he said, with a half-chuckle, with coarse, sharp eyes upon her face.

“He is going to marry her,” Madelon repeated. She stood stiff and straight like a statue, and waited. Once, when Alvin made an impatient motion as though to open the door, she restrained him with such despairing eagerness that he drew back and looked at her wonderingly, and stood in surly silence awhile longer.

“She's got to come out now,” he said, at last. “I've got other things to tend to. Can't stay here no longer, nohow.” He unlocked the door and threw it open with a jerk. “Time's up!” he shouted, and Dorothy came out directly, almost as if she were running away. Alvin Mead clapped to the door with a great jar and locked it. Madelon, had she tried, could not have got a glimpse of Burr; but she did not try. She sprang at Dorothy Fair, and took her by the shoulders, and looked into her scared face with agonized questioning.

“Did—he confess?” she gasped out. “Did—he tell you, did he—tell you, Dorothy Fair?”

Dorothy shook her head in a mute terror that was almost horror. It seemed as if she would sink to the floor under Madelon's heavy hands. Alvin Mead stood staring at them.

“Didn't he—tell you—I was the one who—stabbed Lot? Didn't he—tell you?”

“She's at it again,” muttered Alvin Mead.

Dorothy shook her head. “He wouldn't speak,” she said, faintly. “He would say nothing about it.”

Madelon fairly shook her. “Couldn't you make him speak? You!”

“I couldn't, I couldn't, Madelon!”

“Did you tell him your heart would break if he didn't—that you couldn't marry him if he didn't?”

“Yes—don't, don't—look at me so, Madelon.”

Alvin Mead stepped forward. “Look at here—you're scarin' of that gal to death,” he interfered. “You'd better take your hands off her.”

Then Madelon turned to him, and grasped at the keys in his hands, as if she would wrest them from him. “Unlock the door and let me in, and let Burr Gordon out!” she demanded, wildly.

The jailer wrested his keys away with a contemptuous jerk, and took the skin from Madelon's hands with them. “You're crazy,” he said.

“I am not crazy! You've got an innocent man locked up in there, and I, who am guilty and tell you so, you will not arrest. It is you who are crazy. Let me in!”

Alvin Mead laid a rough hand on Madelon's shoulder. “Now you look at here, gal,” said he. “I've had about all this darned nonsense I'm a-goin' to stan'. That chap is in jail for murder, an' in jail he's a-goin' to stay till I git orders from somebody besides you to let him out. An' what's more, don't you come here on no sich tom-fool arrant agin. If you do you won't git in. I ain't no objection to gals he was goin' to marry ef he hadn't broke the laws comin' to see him a leetle spell, if they'll go away peaceable when they're bid, but as for havin' sech highstericky work as this, I'll be darned if I will. Now I can't stan' here foolin' no longer; you'd better be gittin' right along home, an' don't you break this other gal's neck with that old stepper you've got out there.”

Madelon Hautville said not another word. She went out of the jail quickly, and she and Dorothy were soon in the sleigh and flying down the road. The old racer was not so old nor so weary that the impetus of the homeward stretch failed to stir him—for a mile or so, at least. After that his pace slackened, and then Madelon turned to the other girl, who looked up at her with a kind of piteous defiance. “What did you say to him?” she demanded.

“I—begged him—if he—did not kill Lot to—say so,” replied Dorothy, faintly; then she shrank and quivered before the other girl, who started wrathfully, half as if she would fling her from the sleigh.

“If he did not kill Lot to say so!” repeated Madelon. “If he did not! You know he did not.”

“He would not tell me so,” said Dorothy, with her stubbornness of meekness, and her blue eyes met Madelon's, although there were tears welling up in them.

“Tell you so!” cried Madelon. “What are you made of, Dorothy Fair?”

“He would not,” repeated Dorothy. “If he was innocent, why should he not have told me if he loved me?”

Madelon looked at her. “You don't love him!” she cried out, sharply. “You don't love him, and that's why. You don't love him, Dorothy Fair!”

Dorothy flushed red and drew herself up with gentle stiffness. “You cannot expect me to unveil my heart to you,” said she.

“You have betrayed it,” persisted Madelon. “You don't love him, Dorothy Fair! Shame on you, after all!”

“What right have you to say that?” demanded Dorothy, and this time with some show of anger.

“The right of another woman who does love him, and would save his life,” Madelon answered, fiercely. “The right of a woman who can love more in an hour than such as you in a lifetime!”

“You—don't know—”

“I do know. You don't love him or you would not have distrusted him. You would have made him tell you the truth. You would have flung your arms around him, and you would not have let him go until he told you. Did you do that? Answer me: did you do that?”

A great wave of red crept over Dorothy's face, but she replied, with cold dignity: “I throw my arms around no man unbidden!”

“Unbidden!” repeated Madelon, and scorn seemed to sound in her voice like the lash of a whip. She flung out the reins over the horse's back, and they slipped along swiftly over the icy crust, and not another word did she speak to Dorothy Fair all the way home.

Chapter X

When they entered Parson Fair's south yard there was a swift disappearance of a dark face from a window, and the door was flung open, and the grimly faithful servant-woman came forth and lifted Dorothy out of the sleigh, crooning the while in tender and angry gutturals. Poor Dorothy Fair shook like a white flower in a wind, for beside the rigor of the cold, which seemed to pierce her very soul, the chill of fever was still upon her. She chattered helplessly when she tried to speak, and there were sobs in her throat. The black woman half carried her into the house, and up-stairs to her own chamber, where the hearth-fire was blazing bright. She covered her up warm in bed, with a hot brick at her feet, and dosed her with warm herb drinks, and coddled her, until, after some piteous weeping, she fell asleep.

But for Madelon Hautville there was no rest and no sleep. She felt not the cold, and if she had fever in her veins the fierce disregard of her straining spirit was beyond it. No knowledge of her body at all had Madelon Hautville, no knowledge of anything on earth except her one aim—to save her lover's life. She was nothing but a purpose concentrated upon one end; there was in her that great impetus of the human will which is above all the swift forces of the world when once it is aroused.

She unharnessed the horse quickly from the parson's sleigh, and led him, restive again at the near prospect of his stall and feed, back to the tavern stable, paid for him, and struck out on the homeward road, straight and swift as one of her Indian ancestors. A group of men in the stable door stood aside with curious alacrity to let her pass; they stared after her, then at each other.

“I swan!” said one.

“Wouldn't like to be in the way when that gal was headed anywheres,” said another.

“If that gal belonged to me I'd get her some stronger bits,” said the man who had been cleaning the bay horse when Madelon came for the white.

“I believe she's lost her mind,” said the tavern-keeper. “It's the last time I'll ever let her have a horse, and I told her so.” There came a blast of northwest wind which buffeted them about their faces and chests like an icy flail, and they scattered before it, some to their duties in the stable, some into the warm tavern for a mug of something hot to do away with the chill. It was too cold a day to gossip in a doorway. It was not long past noon, but the cold had seemed to strengthen as the sun rode higher. The wind blew from the icy northwest more frequently in fiercer gusts. Madelon Hautville sped along before it, her red cloak flying out like a flag, and took no thought of it at all. She was, while still in the flesh and upon the earth, so intensified in spirit that there existed for her consciousness neither heat nor cold. She reached the old road, the short-cut, stretched down through the stiff white woods to her own home; she hastened along it a little way, then she stopped and faced back and stood irresolute. The icy wind stiffened her face, but she did not note it. She looked back at the road with its blue snow-furrows stretching between the desolate woods, at the spires and roofs of the village beyond. If one followed that road to the village and took the first one upon the right, and travelled ten miles, one would come to the town of Kingston.

Madelon began moving along on the road to the village, vaguely at first, as if half in a dream, then with gathering purpose. Back she went, in her tracks, straight to the village and the tavern stable, and asked of Dexter Beers another horse to drive to Kingston. But he refused her, standing before her, blocking the stable door, looking aside with a kind of timid doggedness. “Can't let ye have another horse to-day nohow,” said he; “too cold to let 'em out.”

“I'll pay you well,” said Madelon.

“Pay ain't no object. Can't let none of 'em out but the stage-horses in no sech weather as this.” Still Dexter Beers did not look at Madelon's stern and angry eyes; he gazed intently at a post in an icy slant of snow in the yard on the left.

He had the usual masculine dread of an angry woman, and, moreover, he had a sharp-tongued wife, but he had also the masculine tenacity of a position. He stared at the post as if his spirit held fast to it, and braced itself against the torrent of feminine wrath which he expected; but it did not come. Madelon Hautville set her mouth hard, wrapped her red cloak around her with a firm gesture, as if she were a soldier about to start on a long march, and walked out of the yard and up the road without another word.

“I swan!” said Dexter Beers.

The red-faced hostler approached with a pail in each hand bound for the well; he was watering the coach-horses for the next relay. “What's up?” he inquired, pushing past him.

“I'll be darned if I don't believe that gal of Hautville's has started to walk to Kingston, 'cause I wouldn't let her have another horse!”

“Let her go it,” droned the red-faced man, with a short chuckle.

“Hope she won't freeze her feet nor nothin',” said Dexter Beers, uneasily.

“Let her go it!” said the red-faced man, swinging across the yard with his pails.

Madelon Hautville walked on steadily. She reached the right-hand turn, and then she was on the direct Kingston road, with a ten-mile stretch before her. It was past one o'clock, and she could not reach her journey's end much before dark.

About two miles after the turn of the road the more thickly set habitations ceased, and there were only isolated farm-houses, with long, sloping reaches of woods and pasture-lands between. The pasture-lands were hummocked with ice-coated rocks and hooped with frozen vines; they seemed to flow down in glittering waves, like glaciers, over the hill-sides. The woods stood white and petrified, as woods might have done in a glacial era. There was no sound in them except now and then the crack of a bough under the weight of ice, and slow, painful responses, like the twangs of rusty harp-strings, to the harder gusts of wind. The cold was so intense that the ice did not melt in the noonday sun, and there were no soft droppings and gurglings to modify this rigor of white light and sound. Occasionally a rabbit crossed Madelon's path, silent as a little gray scudding shadow, and so swiftly that he did not reach one's consciousness until he was out of sight. There was seldom a winter bird, even, in sight. The ice on the trees and the pastures had locked and sealed their larders. Their little beaks could not pierce it for seeds and grubs, and so they were forced to repair to kitchen doors and barnyards in quest of stray crumbs from the provender of men and cattle.

The rabbits, and an ox-team drawing a sled laden with cedar logs, slipping with shrill, long squeaks over the white road, driven by a man with a red face in an ambush of frozen beard, were all the living things she met for the first four miles. The man clambered stiffly down from his sled just before he met her, and began walking, stamping, rubbing his ears, and swinging his arms violently the while. He stared hard at Madelon, and gave a sort of grunt as he passed. It was an instinctive note of comradeship with another in a situation hard for their common humanity. The man, toiling painfully along that hard road, on that bitter day, with hands and feet half frost-bitten, and face smarting as if with fire, his aching lungs straining with the icy air, felt that he and the woman struggling over the same road had common cause for wrath against this stress of nature, and so made that half-surly, half-sympathetic grunt as he passed her. But she did not respond. She did not even glance at him as she went along. Her face glowed all over, red as a rose with the freezing wind; she wrapped her cloak instinctively tight around her, and walked a little stiffly, as if her feet might be somewhat numb; but there was in her fixed dark eyes no recognition of anything but some end she had in view beyond his ken.

The man stopped and looked seriously after her, and past her down the road. “Wonder what she's up to!” he muttered. Then he struggled on after his oxen, who plodded along with goat's-beards of their frozen breath hanging from their jaws.

Two miles farther on there was a sudden loud blast of a horn, and following upon it a great jangle of bells and the tramp of hoofs, and Madelon knew the Ware and Kingston stage was coming. Presently the top of the coach and the leaders' heads appeared above the rise of the road, and Madelon stood well aside to meet it, pressing in among the crackling icy bushes.

There was another blast of the horn, then a wild rush of sure-footed horses down the hill, and the coach was past, going towards Ware. Madelon had caught only a glimpse of the frost-white driver on the box, a man beside him shrugged up miserably in great-coat and comforter, with back rounded and head bent against the cold, and some chilled faces in the windows. Some of the passengers had come from Wolverton, ten miles past Kingston, and one might freeze to death on a long stage journey a day like that. There was, perhaps, less danger in a walk, but there was danger in that should the cold increase, and it did increase hourly. Madelon's feet grew more and more numb. She stamped them from time to time, but more from instinct than from any real appreciation of the discomfort they gave her. So wrought up was she with zeal that it seemed she might have set out to walk through a fiery furnace as soon as through this frozen waste, and perhaps have had her flesh consumed to ashes, with her soul still intent upon its one purpose. All thought of her own self, save as an instrument to save the life of the man she loved, was gone out of the girl. Jealousy was purged out of her; all resentment for faithlessness, all longing for possession were gone. She bore in her heart the greatest love of her life as she sped along down the frozen road to Kingston.

The last two miles of the way poor Madelon struggled hard to cover. She drew short, gasping breaths, as if she were on a high mountain-top. The cold strengthened as the daylight waned. The very air seemed frozen and resolved into a cutting diamond-dust of frost. Suddenly Madelon awoke to the fear that she could not walk much farther. She had eaten nothing since morning; the cold and fatigue were consuming her life as the flame consumes the wick of the lamp when the oil is lacking.

“I must get there!” she said to herself. She stamped her numb feet desperately. She beat herself pitilessly with her stiff hands. She set forth on a run towards Kingston, and quickened her blood a little in that way, although she panted and fairly gasped for breath.

She drew a sigh of relief when she gained the last rise in the road, and the town of Kingston lay before her a mile in the valley. It was growing dark and the village lights were coming out when she had passed the straggling farms and come into the little centre of the town where the stores, the meeting-houses, and the tavern were grouped.

The village main street looked almost deserted. There was only one sleigh in sight, drawn up in front of the store. The horse was well covered with a buffalo-skin and an old bed-quilt in addition, which his master's wife had doubtless provided on account of the terrible cold.

As Madelon reached the store a man came out with a molasses-jug in hand and arms clasping parcels, which he began stowing away under the seat of the sleigh. Madelon went up to him. “Can you tell me where Mr. Otis lives?” said she. She could scarcely enunciate. Her very tongue seemed stiff with the cold.

The man turned and stared at her with sharp blue eyes under red brows frost-white between his cap and twice-wound red tippet. “Hey?” he said, in a muffled voice.

“Can you tell me where Mr. Otis lives?”

“Otis?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Which Otis d'ye mean? There's two Otises. D'ye mean Calvin Otis or Jim Otis?”

“He has a son that plays the fiddle,” answered Madelon, faintly.

“Then it's Jim ye mean. He died last year. He had a son Jim that plays the fiddle. Lives down the road on the left-hand side, five houses below the meeting-house. House with three popple-trees in front—sets close to the road.”

Madelon started, but the man's voice arrested her. “You look most froze,” said he. “Hadn't ye better go in there an' warm up?” He pointed towards the store-windows with a rosy glow of light and warmth transfusing their thick layers of frost. “It's pipin' hot in there—warm ye all through in a minute. It's a terrible cold night. Old man in there, lived 'round these parts risin' eighty years, says he never knew sech a night. Better just step in there.”

Madelon shook her head and started on.

“Where did ye come from?” called the man.

“Ware Centre,” Madelon gasped out, as the freezing wind struck her.

“Good Lord! you don't mean to say you've walked risin' ten mile from Ware Centre a day like this!”

Madelon was gone, bending before the wind, without another word.

“Good Lord!” said the man, “a woman walkin' from Ware Centre this weather!” He stood staring after the girls' retreating figure; then he started to unblanket his horse. But he stopped and stared again, and finally went into the store to tell the news.

Madelon kept on as fast as she was able, but she was nearly spent. Her exultation of spirit might indeed survive fleshly exhaustion and perhaps in a measure overcome it, but it could not prevent it altogether. When she reached the fifth house below the white meeting-house, the house set close to the road, with three poplar-trees in front, she had just strength enough to stagger to the door and raise the knocker. Then she leaned against the door-post, and it was only with a fierce effort that she kept her grasp upon her consciousness. She did not seem to feel her body at all.

Chapter XI

Presently a bolt was shot and the door pushed open with an effort. It was little used, and there was ice against it. Then a man's face peered out irresolutely into the dusk. A knock upon the front door, upon a night like this, seemed so unlikely that he doubted if he had heard rightly.

“Anybody here?” he said. Then he saw the woman's figure propped stiffly against the door-post. “Who is it?” he asked, in a startled voice. “Is it you, Mrs. Lane?”

Madelon aroused herself. “I want to see Mr. Otis's son a minute if I can,” she said, with a great effort. Then she raised her piteous eyes to the face before her, and realized dimly that it was the face of the young man who had taken her place at the ball, and sent her homeward to work all this misery on that dreadful night.

“I am Mr. Otis's son,” returned the young man, wonderingly. “What”—then he gave a cry—“why, it is you!”

“I want—to—see you—a minute,” said Madelon, and her voice sounded far away in her own ears.

The young man started. “Why, you're half frozen,” he cried out, “and here I am keeping you standing out here! Come in.”

Madelon shrank back. “No,” she faltered, “I—only want to ask—”

But Jim Otis took her by the arm with gentle force, and she was so spent that she could but let him have his way, and lead her into the house and the warm living-room, staggering under his supporting clasp.

“Mother,” called Jim Otis—“mother, come here, quick!” He placed Madelon tenderly on the settle, and his mother came hurriedly out of the pantry.

“What is it?” she asked. “What is the matter, Jim? Who was it knocked? Why, who's that?”

Madelon leaned back helplessly in the corner of the settle, her head hanging half unconsciously. The young man stooped over her and unfastened her cloak and hood. “Come here, quick, mother!” he cried, and his voice was as sweet with pity as a woman's. “This poor girl is half dead with the cold.”

Mrs. Otis, large and fair-faced, with her soft, massive curves swathed in purple thibet, stared for a second in speechless wonder. “Who is it? How did she get here?” she whispered.

“Hush—I don't know. She's from Ware Centre. Her name's Hautville.”

“Seems to me I've heard of her. What has she come here for, Jim?”

“Hush—I don't know. She'll hear you. Go and get something hot for her to drink. I saw her at the ball the other night. Go quick, mother.”

“I'll get her some brandy cordial,” said Mrs. Otis, with sudden alacrity. She needed time always to get her mental bearing thoroughly in any emergency, but action was prompt afterwards. She made a quick motion towards the cupboard, but Madelon aroused herself suddenly. Her senses had lapsed for a few minutes upon coming into the warm room. “Where am I?” she asked, in a bewildered way.

“In our house,” replied Mrs. Otis, promptly. “Jim just brought you in, and it's lucky you come just as you did, for I don't know but you'd froze to death if you'd been out much longer. Now, I'll get you some of my brandy cordial, and that'll warm you right up. Did you come way over from Ware Centre this dreadful night?”

“Yes, ma'am,” replied Madelon, with the dazed look still in her eyes. Mrs. Otis looked back on her way to the cupboard.

“Rode way over from Ware Centre in an open sleigh?” she said.

“No, ma'am; I walked.”

Mrs. Otis stopped and looked at Madelon with a gasp, then at her son. “She's out of her head, I'm afraid,” said she.

“You didn't really walk over from Ware Centre?” questioned Jim.

“Yes, I did,” replied Madelon. She stood up with sudden decision. “I want to see you a minute,” she said to Jim. Then she turned to Mrs. Otis. “I don't need anything to take,” said she. “I was only a little dizzy for a minute when I came into this warm room. I feel better now. I only want to ask your son a question, then I must go home—”

Before Mrs. Otis could speak she asked the question with no preface.

“Didn't you see him give me the knife?” she cried out, with fiercely imploring eyes upon Jim Otis's face.

The young man turned deadly white. He looked at her and did not answer.

“Didn't you?” she repeated.

“What knife?” asked Jim Otis, slowly.

“You know what knife! The knife that my brother handed me when I started home from the ball—the knife that I stabbed Lot Gordon with. Tell me that you saw it, that you saw me take it, here before your mother, and then you must go to New Salem and testify, and set Burr Gordon free! He is in prison for murder, and I am guilty, and they will not believe it. You must tell them, and they will. You saw my brother give me that knife.”

Still Jim Otis, with his white face, stood looking at her, and answered not a word. His mother, continually opening her mouth to speak, then shutting it, looked first at one, then at the other, with round, dilated eyes, turning her head and quivering all over her soft bulk, like some great agitated and softly feathered bird.

“Why don't you speak?” demanded Madelon.

“What is it you want me to say?” said Jim Otis, then, hesitatingly.

“Say? Say that you saw my brother Richard give me the knife that I did the deed with.”

Jim Otis stood silent, with his pale, handsome face bent doggedly towards the floor.

“Say so! You saw it!”

Still Jim Otis did not speak, and Madelon pressed close to him, and thrust her agonized face before his. “Have mercy upon me and speak!” she groaned.

“Jim, what does she mean?” asked his mother, in a frightened whisper. “Is she out of her head?”

“No; hush, mother,” replied Jim. Then he turned to the girl. “No,” he said, with stern, defiant eyes upon her face, “I did not see your brother give you the knife.”

“You did! I know you did!”

“I did not!”

“You did see him! You were looking at us when I went out!”

“I was tightening a string in the fiddle when you went out,” said Jim Otis.

“You must have seen.”

“I tell you I did not.”

Madelon looked at him as if she would penetrate his soul, and he met her eyes fully.

“I did not see your brother give you the knife,” he replied, with a steady, unflinching look at her; but a long shudder went over him as he spoke. The first deliberate lie of his whole life was Jim Otis telling, for he had seen Richard Hautville give his sister the knife.

Madelon believed his lie at last, and turned away. What with her sore exhaustion of body and this last disappointment her heart almost failed her. She went back to the settle for her cloak and her hood, and tied them on, while the others stood watching her, seemingly in a maze. She made for the door, but Jim Otis stopped her.

“You cannot go back to Ware Centre to-night,” he said.

Madelon looked at him with proud determination, although she could scarce stand. “I must go,” said she, and would have pressed past him, but he took hold of her arm.

“Mother,” he said, “tell her she cannot go. There has been no such night as this for forty years, and it is dark now. To-morrow morning I will carry her home; but to-night, as she is, it is out of the question. Tell her so, mother.”

Mrs. Otis gathered herself together then, and came forward and laid hold of Madelon's arm, and strove to pull her back towards the settle. “Come,” said she, as if Madelon were a child—“come, that's a good girl. You stay with us till morning, and then my son shall hitch up and carry you home. I shouldn't dare to have him go way over to Ware Centre to-night, cold as 'tis. He ain't very tough. You stay here with us to-night, and don't worry anything about it. I don't know what you're talkin' about, an' I guess you don't—you are all wore out, poor child; but I guess there didn't nobody have any knife, and I guess he'll git out of prison pretty soon. You just take off your things, and I'll get some pillows out of the bedroom, and you lay down on the settle by the fire while I get some supper. The kettle's on now. And then I'll heat the warming-pan and get the spare-room bed as warm as toast, and mix you up a tumbler of hot brandy cordial, and then you drink it all down and get right into bed, and I'll tuck you up, and I guess you'll feel better in the morning, and things will look different.”

“Let me go,” Madelon said to Jim Otis.

“She mustn't go, mother,” he said, never looking at Madelon at all, although he still held fast to her straining arm.

“Well,” said Mrs. Otis, “You ain't no daughter of mine, and if you set out to go I suppose I ain't any right to hinder you. But there's one thing maybe you ain't thought of—I can't let my son take you 'way over to Ware Centre a night like this, nohow. He's all I've got now, and I can't have anything happen to him. He can't go with you, and there ain't any stable here, and there ain't a neighbor round here that will hitch up and carry you there to-night, and—I suppose you know, if you've got common-sense, that if you set out to walk there, the way you are, you don't stand much chance of gettin' there alive.”

Madelon stared at her.

“I don't really know myself what you and my son have been talkin' about,” continued Mrs. Otis, “but near's I can make out you think you've done something wrong, and somebody's in prison you want to get out. I suppose you've got sense enough to know that if you freeze to death going home to-night you can't do anything more to get him out. Then there's another thing—it's night. You can't do much to get him out anyway before morning. I don't believe they ever let folks out at night, and my son shall carry you over just as soon as it's fit in the morning, and you'll do just as much good as if you went to-night.”

Still Madelon stood staring at her. Then presently she began unfastening her hood and cloak. “If you can keep me till morning I shall be obliged,” she said, with a kind of stern gratitude.

“Stay just as well as not!” cried Mrs. Otis. “Jim, just take her things and lay 'em in the bedroom. Then you have her set right down close to the hearth, and get all warmed through, while I get supper.”

Handsome young Jim Otis stood by with his brows knit moodily while Madelon Hautville removed her wraps, then took them over his arm, and conducted her to the warm seat in the hearth-corner which his mother designated.

In his heart he judged this girl whom he was defending to be guilty, yet was full of intensest admiration, and was sorely torn between the two and his own remorse over his false witnessing. “If I'm called into court and sworn on the Bible, I won't own up that I saw her take that knife,” he muttered to himself, as he laid the red cloak and hood on the high feather-bed in his mother's room.

This handsome, stalwart young man, who had hitherto been considered full of a gay audacity where womenfolk were concerned, able to make almost any pretty girl flutter at his smile, was strangely abashed before this beautiful Madelon Hautville, stained, in his eyes, with crime. He brought in wood and mended the hearth fire; he moved about doing such household tasks as were allotted to his masculine hands, and scarcely let his eyes rest once upon the girl in the chimney-corner. He dreaded the sight of that beautiful face which gave him such a shock of pity and admiration and horror. Jim Otis's mind could not compass this new revelation of a woman, but he would not betray her even for her own pleading if he went down perjured to his grave. So valiant was he in her defence that he withstood her against her own self.

Madelon's mother had died when she was a little girl. She could not fairly remember that ever in her whole life she had been so tended and petted as she was that night by Jim Otis's mother. Kind indeed her father and her brothers had always been to her. They had watched over her with jealous fondness, and had taken all rougher tasks upon themselves, but the devotion of woman, which extends to all the minor details of life, she had never known.

She had never had a supper-table set out for her own especial pleasure with this and that dish to tempt her appetite, as Mrs. Otis set out hers that night. A dish of a fine and sublimated porridge did Mrs. Otis make for her—a porridge mixed with cream and sprinkled with nutmeg and fat plums. “I thought some hot porridge would do you good,” said Mrs. Otis, when she sat the smoking bowl before Madelon. Then she whispered low, that her son, who was putting another stick on the fire before coming to table, might not hear, “It's the same kind of porridge I had after my son was born—with cream and plums in it. I used to think there never was anything so good.” This porridge might well have possessed a flavor of the sweetest memories of motherhood to the older woman, but to the girl, wild with longing to be gone and carry out her purpose, manna from heaven would not have yielded its full measure of sweetness.

She would scarcely have eaten at all had not Jim Otis's mother remarked, as she watched her reluctant sips of the good porridge, “As I said just now, you ain't any daughter of mine, and I ain't any right to dictate, but if you want to get that man, whoever he is, out of prison, you'll have to eat enough to get some strength to do it.”

Simply placid as Mrs. Otis looked, she had often wisdom enough to gain her ends by means of that shrewd finesse of government which appeals to the reason of others as applied to the furthering of their own desires.

Madelon after that swallowed her porridge almost greedily, and when supper was over went up-stairs to bed, following Mrs. Otis as readily as any meek young daughter of her own might have done. The spirit of resistance was laid for the time in this poor Madelon Hautville, but it had yielded, after all, more to the will of her own reason than to Jim Otis's mother or the weariness of her own flesh.

When Mrs. Otis came down-stairs she was flushed with pleasant motherly victory. “She's drunk all that hot cordial,” she said to her son, “every drop of it, and I've tucked her into bed with the extra comfortables over her, an' she eat quite a good supper, an' I told her to go right to sleep, and I guess she will.”

“If she don't she'll be down sick,” said Jim, sternly. He sat by the fire, tuning his fiddle.

“She can't hear your fiddle so it'll keep her awake, can she?” asked Mrs. Otis, anxiously.

“Of course she can't, up in the front chamber, with all the doors shut. Wouldn't have touched it if she could.”

“Well, I don't s'pose she can. Jim—”

Jim twanged a string. “What is it, mother?”

“I don't want to have you think I'm interferin', Jim. I know you're grown-up now, and I know there's things a young man might not want to tell his mother till he gets ready, but I do kind of want to know one thing, Jim.”

Jim tightened the G string. He bent his face low over his violin. “I don't know as I've ever kept much back from you, mother,” he said, soberly.

“No, I know you ain't, Jim; you've always told more to your mother than most boys. But I didn't just know but this might be something you hadn't got ready to speak about.”

“What is it you want to know, mother?”

“Jim, is that your girl?”

Jim laughed a little, although his eyes were grave; he raise the fiddle to his shoulder. “Lord, no, mother. I wouldn't get a girl without asking you.”

“I didn't know but you might have seen her over to Ware when you've been there to parties, and not said anything.”

“I never saw her but that once, mother.” Jim struck up “Kinloch of Kinloch,” but he played softly, lest by any chance Madelon, aloft in her chamber, might hear.

“She's handsome as a picture,” said his mother. “Who is it that's in prison, Jim?”

“A young man by the name of Gordon.”

“What for?”

“They think he stabbed his cousin.”

“My sakes! Do you s'pose he did, Jim?”

“I don't know, mother. I wasn't there.”

“I s'pose the young man that did it is this girl's beau, and that's why she's so crazy to get him out.”

Jim played the merry measure softly, and made no reply.

His mother stood before him quivering with curiosity, which she restrained lest it defeat its own ends. She had learned early that too impetuous feminine questioning is apt to strike a dead-wall in the masculine mind.

“I didn't quite understand what she meant about a knife,” she ventured, with an eager glance at her son. He played a little louder, as if he did not hear.

“I s'pose she come here, walked all that way from Ware Centre, this dreadful night, 'cause she thought you could help to get her young man out of prison.”

Jim nodded as he fiddled.

“But I can't see how your seein' her brother give her a knife could do any good. Of course that sweet, pretty girl didn't do it herself. But you didn't see her brother give her the knife, Jim?”

“Didn't you hear me say I didn't?” replied Jim, with sudden force. “Don't let's talk any more about it, mother. It's a dreadful piece of work, anyway. I don't half know what it means myself. That poor girl is 'most crazy because that fellow is in prison. That's why she came on this wild-goose chase after me. You can't tell anything by what she says.”

“Wasn't he a nice kind of a fellow before this happened, Jim?”

“No, he was a scamp,” said Jim Otis, angrily. He struck into the “Fisher's Hornpipe” with fury, regardless of the girl up-stairs.

“Land sakes, Jim, don't fiddle quite so loud as that—I'm dreadful afraid she'll hear,” said his mother. “I shouldn't thought a girl that looks as sweet as she does would ever have taken up with a scamp.”

“The sweetest girls are the worst fools,” answered Jim, bitterly, but he obeyed his mother and played less loudly. The shadows of the winter night might have footed it to the soft measures of the hornpipe which Jim Otis played on his fiddle. His mother could scarcely hear it in the pantry when she went in there to set away the supper dishes. She shut the door every time, lest her son should feel the icy air from the fireless closet. She had always a belief that Jim was delicate, and took a certain pride in it, although she could not have told why.

Everything that was in the least likely to freeze to its injury had to be removed from the cold pantry and set on the hearth that bitter night. It was quite a while before her soft, heavy pattering, which jarred the house when she stepped on certain parts of the floor, ceased, and she took her knitting-work and sat down in her rocking-chair opposite her son.

Jim continued to fiddle, touching the strings as if his fingers were muffled with down. The wind whistled more loudly than his fiddle; it had increased, and the cold with it. Some of Mrs. Otis's crocks froze on the hearth that night. No such cold had been known in Vermont for years. The frost on the window-panes thickened—the light of the full moon could not penetrate them; all over the house were heard sounds like those on a straining ship at sea. The old timbers cracked now and then with a report like a pistol. “It's a dreadful night,” said Mrs. Otis, and as she spoke the returning wind struck the house, and she gasped as if it had in truth taken her breath away.

A few minutes before nine o'clock Mrs. Otis put away her knitting-work and got the great Bible off the desk. “Stop fiddling now, Jim,” she said, solemnly. Mrs. Otis spoke with more direct authority in religious matters than in others. She felt herself well backed by the spiritual law. Jim finished the tune he was playing and lowered his fiddle from his shoulder. His mother found the place in the Bible, and the holy words were on her tongue when there was a sharp clash of sleigh-bells close under the window.

“Somebody's drove into the yard!” cried Mrs. Otis. “Who do you s'pose 'tis this time of night?”

“Hullo!” shouted a man's voice, hoarsely, and Jim shouted “Hullo!” in response, and started towards the door.

“Ask who's there before you open the door,” said the mother, anxiously. She stood listening a moment after Jim had gone; then she caught her shawl from a peg, put it over her head, and followed him—she was so afraid some harm would come to her son.

The outer door was open, and before it was drawn up a sleigh and a great, high-shouldered, snorting and pawing horse. In the sleigh was a man muffled in furs like an Eskimo, leaning out and questioning Jim.

“When did she come?” asked the man.

“About five o'clock,” answered Jim.

Then Mrs. Otis understood that they were talking about the girl in her spare-chamber, and she interposed, standing in the doorway. “She was just about tuckered out, what with the cold and that awful tramp,” said she. “She most ought to have rode over.” Mrs. Otis's voice was soft and conciliatory.

“We didn't know she was coming,” replied the man in the sleigh, courteously, “or we should not have let her walk so far on such a day.”

“Be you her brother?” questioned Mrs. Otis.

“Yes. I'm her brother Eugene.”

“And you drove over to see where she was?”

“Yes; we've been very anxious.”

“Well, you can be easy about her for to-night,” said Mrs. Otis. “She's tucked up nice and warm in my spare-chamber bed, and I give her a tumbler of my brandy cordial, and I guess she's sound asleep.”

“He wants to take her home to-night, mother,” said Jim, and there was a curious appeal in his tone.

Mrs. Otis, standing there on the door-step in the freezing moonlight, turned quickly upon the man in the sleigh, and all the soft conciliation was gone from her voice. “You ain't plannin' to take that girl way home to Ware Centre to-night?” said she.

“Father sent me for her,” replied Eugene Hautville.

“Well, she ain't goin' a step!”

“Her father will expect me to bring her,” said Eugene, with his unfailing courtesy. “He has been very anxious. I had hard work to find where she was. My father won't be satisfied if I come home without her.”

“That girl ain't going out of this house to-night!”

“I've got a bearskin here to wrap her up in. She is used to being out in all weathers,” persisted Eugene, gently.

“She can't go. Pull her out of a warm bed such a night as this! If you try to take that poor child out to-night I'll stand in my spare-chamber door, and you'll have to walk over me to do it—and my son won't see his mother hurt, I guess!”

Jim Otis stepped closer to the sleigh and spoke to Eugene Hautville in a low voice.

“Well,” said Eugene, slowly, “maybe you're right, Otis. I don't know what father will say, but if she was as used up as you tell for, I don't know as 'tis safe. It is an awful night.”

“I guess it ain't safe, and she ain't going,” maintained Mrs. Otis from the door-step.

Then Eugene Hautville bent well out of his sleigh and asked a question in the other man's ear.

“Yes, she did,” replied Jim Otis.

“The poor girl is crazy over it,” said Eugene. He and Jim talked for a few moments, but Mrs. Otis, straining her ears on the door-step, could not hear.

Suddenly Jim said, quite distinctly, “She wanted to know if I saw him give her the knife.”

There was a pause; then Eugene Hautville asked, in a voice with which he might have addressed a judge of his life and death, “Did you?”

“No,” said Jim Otis.

Chapter XII

The next morning there took place in a few hours a great change in the temperature. It moderated rapidly. The frost on the windows and the ice-ridges in the roads did not soften yet, since the sun was overcast by heavy clouds, but the terrible rigor and tension of the cold was relaxed, and men could breathe without constraint. At eight o'clock, when Jim Otis and Madelon started for Ware Centre, there was a white film of fallen snow over the distant hills and scattering flakes drove in advance of the storm.

A mile out of Kingston it snowed hard. “Hadn't you better have that extra shawl mother put in over your shoulders?” Jim Otis suggested.

But Madelon shook her head. “The snow won't hurt me,” she said. She sat up straight in the sleigh, and there was a look in her eyes, fixed ahead on the white drive of the storm, as if her spirit were out-speeding her body. She had her strength again that morning. She had slept and eaten. She had submitted to the exigencies of life that she might gain power to resist them again.

Jim Otis drove a stout little mare with a good wind for speed, but she had not the stride of David Hautville's great roan. Moreover, after the first stretch, she slacked on the hills and fell into walks in the lonely reaches, almost as if she had learned it in a lesson. Many a pretty girl, flushing sweetly under Jim Otis's gay smile, and perhaps under his caressing arm, had ridden behind that little canny mare, who learned well the meaning of the careless rein along the woodland roads.

However, to-day there was no careless rein. At the first slack Madelon herself had reached the whip and touched the gently ambling neck. “She has more speed in her than this,” said she, shortly.

“She hasn't been driven for two days, either,” asserted Jim Otis. “Wake up, Molly!” He took the whip himself and flourished it with a quick little snap over her back. In truth, Jim Otis was as anxious to be at this journey's end as Madelon, for he feared every minute lest she should ask him again if he had seen her take the knife, and that he would again have to oppose falsehood to her frantic pleading. But Madelon had believed him. She did not beg him again for his evidence. She sat still at his side with a strained look in her black eyes, and they rode in silence, with the storm heaping its white flakes on their shoulders, until they reached Ware Centre.

Then Madelon turned quickly to Jim Otis. “Don't drive to my home,” said she; “I would rather not go home yet. Drive to Burr Gordon's house, please. I want to see his mother. Don't turn—keep straight on.”

“Yes, I know where he lives,” said Jim, soberly. He drove very slowly. They were drawing near the turn in the road. “See here,” he said, suddenly, “don't you think you'd better go home now?” He spoke with nothing of the half-gay, half-caressing authority with which he was wont to turn a pretty girl to his mind, but timidly rather, and kept his eyes fixed on the mare's nodding head, hooded with snow.

“No, I must see Burr's mother,” replied Madelon.

“But your folks will be expecting you, won't they?” persisted Jim Otis. He felt that he had a duty of loyalty towards this desperate girl's father and brothers as well as to herself. He had promised Eugene Hautville to bring her home this morning, and who could tell where she might wander and when she might return if he left her now?

He still did not look at Madelon as he spoke, but he felt her turn and fasten her eyes upon his face, and somehow they compelled his. He raised them and saw her beautiful face full of a scorn of passion which he might die and never know in himself.

“What do you think that is to me,” said she, “when I've got to save his life? If you do not wish to carry me farther, go back. I will walk.”

“I will take you wherever you wish,” returned Jim Otis, and touched up the mare, and neither spoke again until they reached Burr Gordon's house, high on its three terraces, with Lot Gordon's opposite. Then Jim halted his mare in the road before it, and would have alighted to assist Madelon, but she sprang out before him. “I am much obliged to you and your mother for what you have done for me,” said she, and turned with a swing of her red cloak, and was skimming up the terraces like a red-winged bird.

As for Jim Otis, he slewed his sleigh about recklessly, and shook the whip over the little mare, and drove up the road. When he reached the turn which he knew led to the Hautville house he drew rein, and sat pondering in his sleigh for a few minutes. He was in doubt whether he should inform Eugene Hautville of his sister's whereabouts or not. Finally he spoke to the mare, and continued on his way to Kingston.

The terraces which Madelon mounted were all covered with the gathering snow. When she reached the last the door was opened, and Burr Gordon's mother, Elvira, stood there. “I am sorry there's so much snow for you to wade through,” said she, in a sweet, quiet voice.

“I don't mind it, thank you,” replied Madelon, harshly. She felt incensed with this mother of Burr's, who came to the door and greeted her as if she were an ordinary caller, and her son were not in prison.

“You had better shake it off your skirts or you'll take cold,” said Mrs. Gordon.

“I am not afraid,” returned Madelon. She gave her skirts a careless flirt and entered the door with the snow still clinging to her.

“If you will wait a moment,” said Mrs. Gordon, “I will get a broom and brush the snow from you before it melts. Then you won't take cold.”

“I don't care to have you, thank you,” said Madelon. Mrs. Gordon said no more, but led the way to the sitting-room. She was a tall, slender woman with the face of a saint, long and pale, and full of gentle melancholy, with large, meek-lidded blue eyes and patiently compressed lips. She had a habit of folding her long hands always before her, whether she walked or sat, and she moved with sinuous wavings of her widow-bombazine.

The room into which she ushered Madelon was accounted the grandest sitting-room in the village. When Burr's father had built his fine new house he had made the furnishings correspond. He had eschewed the spindle-legged tables and fiddle-backed chairs of the former generations, and taken to solid masses of red mahogany, which were impressive to the village folk. The carpet was a tapestry of great crimson roses with the like of which no other floor in town was covered, and, moreover, there was a glossy black stove instead of a hearth fire.

“Please be seated,” said Mrs. Gordon. She indicated the best chair in the room. When her guest had taken it, she sat down herself in the middle of her great haircloth sofa, and folded her long hands in her lap. Mrs. Gordon had the extremest manners of the old New England gentlewoman—so punctiliously polite that they called attention to themselves. She had married late in life, having been previously a preceptress in a young ladies' school. She was still the example of her own precepts—all outward decorum if not inward composure.

Madelon Hautville, opposite her, in her snow-powdered cloak, with her face like a flash of white fire in her snow-powdered silk hood, seemed in comparison a female of another and an older race. She might well, from the look of her, have come a nearer and straighter road from the inmost heart of things, from the unpruned tangle of woods and undammed course of streams, from all primitive and untempered love and passion and religion, than this gentlewoman formed upon the models of creeds and scholars.

Madelon looked at the other woman a second with fierce questioning. Then she sprang up out of the chair where she had been placed, and stood before her on her sofa, and cried out, abruptly, “I have come to tell you about your son. He is not guilty. I, myself, stabbed Lot Gordon!”

“Please be seated,” said Elvira Gordon, and her folded hands in her lap never stirred.

“Seated!” cried Madelon, “seated! How can you be seated, how can you rest a moment—you, his mother? Why do you not set out to New Salem now—now? Why do you not walk there, every step, in the snow? Why do you not crawl there on your hands and knees, if your feet fail you, and plead with him to confess that I speak the truth, and tell them to set him free?”

“I beg of you not to so agitate yourself,” said Elvira Gordon. “You will be ill. Pray be seated.”

Madelon bent towards her with a sudden motion, as if she would seize her by the shoulders.

“Are you his mother,” she cried—“his mother—and sit here, like this, and speak like this? Why do you not move? Why do you not start this instant for New Salem—this instant?”

“I beg you to calm yourself,” replied Elvira Gordon. “I have been to New Salem to visit my son. I have prayed with him in his prison.”

“Prayed with him! Don't you know that he is innocent, and in prison for murder—your own son? You stop to pray with him; why don't you act to save him?”

“You will make yourself ill, my dear.”

“Don't you believe that your son is innocent?” demanded Madelon. “Don't you believe it?”

Her eyes blazed; she clinched her hands. She felt as if she could spring at this other woman with her gentle murmurings and soft foldings, and shake her into her own meaning of life. If her impulse had had the power of deed, Elvira Gordon's little cap of fine needle-work would have been a fiercely crumpled rag upon her decorous head, her sober bands of gray hair would have streamed like the locks of a fury, the quiet clasp of her long fingers would have been stirred with some response of indignant defence if nothing else. Madelon, with her, realized that worst balk in the world—the balk of a passive nature in the path of an active one—and all her fiery zeal seemed to flow back into herself and fairly madden her.

“I hope,” said Elvira Gordon, “that my son will be proved innocent and set free.”

“Proved innocent! Don't you know your own son is innocent?”

“I pray without ceasing that he may be acquitted of the crime for which he is imprisoned,” replied Elvira Gordon, over her folded hands.

Madelon looked at her. “You are a good woman,” said she, with fierce scorn. “You are a member of Parson Fair's church, and you keep to the commandments and all the creed. You are a good woman, and you believe in the eternal wrath of God and the guilt of your own son. You believe in that, in spite of what I tell you. But I tell you again that I, and not your son, am guilty, and I will save him yet!”

Madelon Hautville gathered her red cloak about her, and Mrs. Gordon arose as she would have done when any caller was about to take leave. It would scarcely have seemed out of keeping with her manner had she politely invited Madelon to call again. However, her quiet voice was somewhat unsteady and hoarse when she spoke to Madelon on the threshold of the outer door, although the words were still gently formal. “I am grateful to you for the interest you take in my son,” she said; “I hope you will not excite yourself so much that you will be ill.”

“I will die if that can save him,” answered Madelon Hautville, and went down the snowy steps over the terraces.

Elvira Gordon, when she had closed the door, drew the bolt softly. Truth was, she thought the girl had gone mad through grief and love for her son. Believing, as she did, that the love was all unsought and unreturned, and being also shocked in all her delicate decorum by such unmaidenly violence and self-betrayal, she regarded Madelon with a strange mixture of scorn and sympathy and fear.

Moreover, not one word did she believe of Madelon's assertion that she herself was guilty. “She is accusing herself to save my son,” thought Elvira Gordon, and her heart seemed to leap after the girl with half-shamed gratitude, in spite of her astonishment and terror, as she watched her go out of the yard and across the road to Lot Gordon's house. Mrs. Gordon stood at one of the narrow lights beside her front door and watched until Madelon entered the opposite house; then she went hastily through her fine sitting-room to her own bedroom, and there went down on her knees, and all her icy constraint melted into a very passion of weeping and prayer. Those placidly folded hands of hers clutched at the poor mother-bosom in the fury of her grief; those placid-lidded eyes welled over with scalding tears; that calmly set mouth was convulsed like a wailing child's, and all the rigorous lines of her whole body were relaxed into overborne curves of agony. “Oh, my son, my son, my son!” lamented Elvira Gordon. “Have mercy, have mercy, O Father in heaven! Let him be proved innocent! Let Lot Gordon live! Oh, my son!”

Elvira Gordon had the stern pride of justice of a Brutus. She would not without proof discover even to the passionate pleading of her own heart that she believed her son innocent, but believe it she did. Every breath she drew was a prayer that Lot Gordon might yet speak and clear Burr. This morning she had some slight hope that that might come to pass, for the sick man had passed a comfortable night except for his old enemy, the cough.

“It's my belief,” Margaret Bean had told Elvira, when she had sped across the road in the early morning to inquire, “that it's his old trouble that's going to kill him when he does die instead of anything else.”

“Has he spoken yet?” asked Elvira, eagerly.

“No, he ain't; but there's none so still as them that won't speak.” Margaret Bean nodded shrewdly at Elvira. Her voice was weak and hoarse as if from a cold or much calling, but there was sharp emphasis in it. She gave a curious impression of spirit subdued and tearfully rasped, like her face, yet never lacking.

“You—think he—could?” whispered Elvira Gordon.

“'Tain't for me to say,” replied Margaret Bean. “He lays there—looks most as if he was dead.” She wiped her eyes hard, with a handkerchief so stiff that it looked on that cold morning frozen as with old tears. Margaret Bean was famous for her fine starching in the village; it was her chief domestic talent, and she was faithful in its application in all possible directions.

“I wish he would speak if he could,” said Mrs. Gordon.

“I do, if it's for the best,” returned Margaret Bean. She hesitated; there were red rings around her tearful eyes, like a bird's. “I can't believe your son did it, nohow, Mis' Gordon,” said she.

“I hope if my son is innocent he will be proved so,” returned Elvira Gordon. She was too proudly just herself not to use the word if, and yet she could have slain the other woman for the sly doubt and pity in her tone.

“It's harder for you than 'tis for him, layin' there,” said Margaret Bean, nodding towards the house. There was an odd gratulation of pity in her tone. She rubbed her eyes again.

“We all have our own burdens,” replied Elvira, with a dignified motion, as if she straightened herself under hers. “I hope he will be able to speak—soon.”

“I hope so, if it's for the best,” said Margaret Bean.

Chapter XIII

Elvira Gordon had gone home hoping that Lot might yet speak. She had heard his rattling cough as she picked her way out of the icy yard, and Madelon also heard it when she entered it. She knocked at the side door, and Margaret Bean opened it. She had a gruel cup in her hand.

“I want to see him,” said Madelon.

Margaret Bean looked at her. Her starched calico apron flared out widely over her lank knees across the doorway.

“I'm afraid he ain't able to see nobody this morning,” said she, and the asperity in her tone was less veiled than usual. Her voice was not so hoarse. She was mindful of this girl's former conduct at her master's bedside, and herself half believed her mad or guilty. A suspicious imagination had Margaret Bean, and Madelon would have found in her a much readier belief than in others.

“I've got to see him, whether he's able or not,” said Madelon.

“The doctor said—”

“I'm going to see him!”

Madelon pushed roughly in past the smooth apron and ran through the entry to Lot's room, with the housekeeper staring after her in a helpless ruffle of indignation.

“She's gone in there,” she told her husband, who appeared in the kitchen door, dish-towel in hand. Margaret Bean's husband always washed the dishes and performed all the irresponsible domestic duties of the establishment. He was commonly adjudged not as smart as his wife, and little store was set by his counsels. Indeed, at times the only dignity of his man's estate which seemed left to this obediently pottering old body was the masculine pronoun which necessarily expressed him still. However, even in that the undisturbed use was not allowed. “Margaret Bean's husband” was usually substituted for “He,” and nothing left of him but the superior feminine element feebly qualified by masculinity.

Margaret Bean's husband's name was Zenas, but scarcely anybody knew it, and he had almost forgotten it himself through never being addressed by it. Margaret herself spoke of her husband as “Him,” but she never called him anything, except sometimes “You.” However, he always knew when she meant him, and there was no need of specification.

Now he half thought she was appealing to his masculine authority from her bewildered air. He stiffened his meek old back. “Want me to go in there and order her out?”

“You! Go back in there and finish them dishes.”

Margaret Bean's husband went back into the kitchen, and Margaret followed Madelon with a sly, determined air, to Lot's room.

The great square northwest room was warm, but the frost had not yet melted from the window-panes. The room looked full of hard white lines of frost, and starched curtains, and high wainscoting; but the hardest white lines of all were in Lot Gordon's face, sunken sharply in his pillows, showing between the stiff dimity slants of his bed-hangings as in a tent door. He looked already like a dead man, except for his eyes. It seemed as if the life in them could never die when they saw Madelon. She bent over him, darkening the light.

“Speak now!” said she.

Lot Gordon looked up at her.

“I tell you, speak! I will not bear this any longer. I am at the end.”

Still Lot Gordon looked up at her silently.

Then Madelon made a quick motion in the folds of her skirt, and there was the long gleam of a hunting-knife above the man in the bed. Margaret Bean, standing by the door, shrieked faintly, but she did not stir.

“I have tried everything,” said Madelon. “This is the last. Speak, or I will make your speaking of no avail. I will strike again, and this time they shall find me beside you and not Burr. My new guilt shall prove my old, and they will hang me and not him. Speak, or, before God, I will strike!”

Then Lot Gordon spoke. “I love you, Madelon,” said he.

“Say what I bid you, Lot Gordon; not that.”

“All your bidding is in that.”

“Will you?”

“I will clear—Burr.”

Madelon slipped her knife away, and stood back. Margaret Bean slunk farther around past the bedpost. Neither of them could see her.

“On one condition,” said Lot Gordon.

“What?”

“That you marry me.”

Madelon gasped. “You?”

Lot laughed faintly, stretching his ghastly mouth. “You think it is an offer of wedlock from a churchyard knight,” he said.

“What are you talking about, Lot Gordon?”

“Marry me!”

“Marry you? I am going to prison to-day for stabbing you. If you die, I die for your murder. Marriage between us? You are mad, Lot Gordon.”

Lot Gordon opened his mouth to speak, but he coughed instead. He half raised himself feebly, and his cough shook the bed. Madelon waited until he lay back, gasping.

“You are mad to talk so,” she said again, but her voice was softer.

“No madder—than—my ancestors made me,” Lot stammered, feebly. Great drops of sweat stood on his forehead.

Madelon stood looking at him. He lay still, breathing hard, for a little; then he spoke again. “Say you will marry me, and I will clear him,” he said, “or else—strike as you will. But all will believe that Burr struck the first blow and you the second for love of him, and though he be not hung, the mark of the noose will be round his neck in folks' fancies so long as he draws the breath of life.”

“I will marry you,” said Madelon.

“Don't cheat yourself,” Lot went on, in his disjointed sentences, broken with the rise of the cough in his throat. “This wound may not be—mortal—after all, and a man lives—long, sometimes, when he's sore put to it for breath. The spark of life dies hard, and you may fan it into a blaze again. All the doctor's nostrums may not stir my poor dying flesh—but give the spirit—what it craves—and 'tis sometimes—strong enough—to gallop the flesh where it will. Lord, I've seen a tree blossom in the fall, when 'twas warm enough. It may be a long life we'll—live together, Madelon. Don't—cheat—yourself into—thinking you'll be my widow, instead of—my wife. My wife you may be, and—the mother of my children.”

Madelon moved towards him with a curious, pushing motion, as if she thrust out of her way her own will. She bent over him her white face, holding her body aloof. “I will marry you, come what will. Now, set him free.”

Great tears stood in Lot's eyes. “Oh,” he whispered, “you think only of him. I love you better than he does, Madelon.”

“Set him free,” said she, in a hard voice.

Lot heaved a great sigh, and rolled his eyes feebly about towards the door.

“Find—Margaret Bean,” he began; and with that Margaret Bean, who had kept the door ajar, slid out softly, “and tell her—to send her husband to—Parson Fair, and—Jonas Hapgood, and she—must go the other way for—the doctor. Tell them to come at once.”

With that Lot fell to coughing again, but Madelon went out quickly, and found Margaret Bean in the kitchen mixing gruel.

“Mr. Gordon wishes your husband to go at once for Parson Fair and Jonas Hapgood, and you for the doctor,” said she.

“Is he took worse?” asked Margaret Bean, innocently, with a quick sniff of apprehension.

“No, he is no worse, but he wishes to see them. He said to go at once.”

Margaret Bean cast an injured eye at the window, all blurred with the clinging shreds of the storm. “I don't see how I can get out in this awful storm nohow,” she said. “I've got rheumatism now. Why can't he go to see 'em all, I'd like to know?”

“The doctor lives a quarter of a mile the other way. It will save time.”

Margaret Bean looked at the gruel. “I've got to make this gruel for him.”

“I will make it. Get your shawl, quick.”

“It ain't b'iled.”

“I tell you I will make it.”

“Why can't he go to both places?”

“I will go myself!” Madelon cried, suddenly. She had been bewildered, or that would have occurred to her before. She had never been one to send where she could go, but for the time Lot Gordon's will had overcome hers. “Tell your husband to go to the parson's and the sheriff's, quick, and I will go for the doctor,” said she, and was flashing out of the yard in her red cloak before Margaret Bean had time to turn herself about from the prospect of her own going. Then she ordered her husband imperiously into his boots and great-coat and tippet, and sent him forth.

She finished the gruel, and took it in to the sick man, and fed him with hard thrusts of the spoon. Lot looked about feebly for Madelon, and Margaret Bean replied to the look, in her husky voice, “She's gone, instead of me. I've got rheumatism too bad to venture out in such a storm and get my petticoats bedraggled.” She spoke with a little whine of defiant crying, but Lot took no notice. He was exhausted. After he had eaten the gruel, he pointed to the chimney-cupboard.

“What is it ye want?” said she.

Lot pointed.

“How do I know what ye want when ye jest p'int like that?”

But there came then a look into Lot Gordon's eyes as expressive as a word, and Margaret Bean crossed over to the chimney-cupboard, and got out the brandy-flask and a wine-glass and some loaf-sugar. She mixed a little dose of the brandy and sugar, and would have fed it to the sick man as she had the gruel, but he motioned her aside, raised himself with an effort, and drank it down eagerly. Then he lay still, and soon a faint flush came into his face. Margaret Bean went back into the kitchen and mixed some bread, with her eye upon the window.

Presently there was a wild gallop and great clash of bells past the window, and a shout at the door. Margaret Bean put on her little blue shawl and opened it when the shout had been twice repeated. Old David Hautville sat there in his sleigh, keeping a tight rein on his tugging roan. “My daughter here?” he shouted. “Whoa, there!”

“There's sick folks here,” said Margaret Bean, shivering in the doorway. “You hadn't ought to holler so.” Her tearful eyes were more frankly hostile than usual. She had always looked down from her own slight eminence of life upon these Hautvilles, and now was full of scorn that her master was to marry one of them.

“I want to know if my daughter is here,” said David Hautville, and he did not lower his voice. It sounded like a hoarse bellow of wrath, coming out of the white whirl of snow. His fur coat was all crusted with snow, his great mustache heavy with it; the roan plunged in a rising cloud of it.

“No, she ain't here,” replied Margaret Bean, and her weak voice seemed by its very antithesis to express the utmost scorn and disgust at the brutality of the other.

“Has she been here?”

“Yes, she's been here.” Margaret made as though to shut the door, but David Hautville stopped her.

“Did she start for home?”

“You'd better ask somebody that knows more about it.”

“Where did she go?”

“You'd better ask somebody that knows about it!” repeated Margaret Bean, in her malicious meekness. Then she shut the door.

David Hautville, with a great “whoa!” leaped out of the sleigh. He led up the roan with a fierce pull to the fence, and tied her there. Then he strode into the house, and through the entry to Lot's room, with no ceremony.

“Where is my daughter?” he demanded, standing at Lot's bedside in his great fur coat, all bristling with points of snow.

“She'll be back presently,” answered Lot. His voice was a little stronger; there were two red spots on his cheeks.

“Where's she gone?”

“For the doctor.”

All at once David Hautville gave a great start. “Why, you're talking!” he cried out. “You couldn't speak.”

Lot nodded vaguely.

“You're better, then?” cried the other, with a sharp look at him.

Lot nodded again.

“When did she come here?”

“Just now.”

“Same damned nonsense, I suppose. She's gone mad. If the law don't finish that fellow, I will!”

Lot motioned towards a chair. “Sit down,” he whispered.

“She coming back with the doctor?”

“Yes,” Lot coughed.

David Hautville settled into a chair with a surly grunt. He watched Lot cough, holding to his straining chest, and thought that he must be worse, else he would not have sent for the doctor. He resolved to wait and take his daughter home with him, by force if necessary, but with no more disturbance of this man, who might be sick unto death. Seeing Lot cast his eyes about as if looking for something, and make a motion towards the table at his side, he rose up quickly and got him a spoonful of the cough mixture in a bottle thereon, and administered it to him gently.

“Don't you touch my wet coat,” said David Hautville, “or yo'll get a chill,” and he held himself carefully away from the sick man.

When Lot lay back, panting, he returned to his chair and did not speak again. The two remained in silence until there came the jingle of bells, the tramp of horses' feet, and the voice of men out in the yard.

Lot lay still, with his eyes closed. David Hautville raised his head and looked at the window, thick with frost. Presently the door was opened softly, and the doctor came in, with Parson Fair and Jonas Hapgood. Madelon, in her snow-powdered red cloak, came last. David started up fiercely when he saw her; then he stood back and waited. The doctor bent over Lot and began counting his pulse. He eyed him sharply.

“The pendulum still swings,” said Lot.

The doctor started. “You can speak, then!” he cried out, brusquely.

Lot smiled.

The doctor was old, and his long struggle with birth and death had begun to tell upon him. He had already visited Lot that morning, after a hard night with a patient, back in the hills. His face was haggard under its sharp gray bristle of beard; his eyes fierce, like an old dog's, with fatigue and hunger. He had just reached home and sat down to his breakfast when this new call came. He had thought Lot was dying from Madelon's imperative summons, and she had not undeceived him. She was growing cunning in her desperate efforts to save Burr Gordon.

“What in thunder did ye send for me again for?” he snapped. This old country doctor was never chary of plain speaking, and his brusqueness had increased his popularity. Many of his patients were simple countrywomen, who had greater belief in that which they feared. They repeated his half-savage speeches to each other, and added, “He's a good doctor, if he does speak out.”

Lot only smiled that covert smile of his, which seemed to imply some wisdom of humor beyond the ken of others. “I ought to be dying,” he said, with grim apology. “I ought not—to have disturbed you all for a less reason than to witness my final exit, but I want you to witness something else.” Lot Gordon spoke quite strongly and connectedly.

“What?” asked the doctor, irritably.

“I want to make a statement,” said Lot Gordon.

There was a pause. Jonas Hapgood, with his look of heavy facetiousness, slightly tempered now with curiosity, stood lounging into his great snowy boots at the foot of the bed. Parson Fair, the consolation for the dying which he had thought to administer still in his mind, which could not swerve easily, his slender height in his black surtout inclined towards the sick man with gentle courtesy, waited. Margaret Bean peered around the bed-curtain. Madelon stood near the doctor, her face white as if she were dead, and a look of awful listening upon it. In the background David Hautville, wrathful and wondering, towered over them all.

“I wish to declare in the presence of these witnesses,” said Lot Gordon, “the doctor here testifying that I am in my right mind”—the doctor gave a surly grunt of assent—“that it is my firm belief that all mortal ills come to man through his own agency, and this last ill of mine is no exception. I declare solemnly before you all that my cousin Burr Gordon is not guilty of administering this wound which I bear in my side.”

The sheriff started forward. “Who did do it, then?” he cried out.

“I myself,” replied Lot Gordon.

Chapter XIV

There was a gasp of astonishment from the company. Jonas Hapgood began to speak, but Madelon's soprano drowned out his thick bass.

“How dare you,” she cried out, “swear to that lie? Liar! You are a liar, Lot Gordon!”

Then, before Lot could reply, David Hautville came forward with a mighty plunge, and grasped his daughter by the arm, and forced her to the door.

“Get ye out of this,” growled David Hautville; but Madelon turned her face back in the doorway for one last word. “Don't you know,” she shrieked back to Lot Gordon, in her pitiless despair—“don't you know that I would rather have seen the inside of my prison-cell to-night and the gallows to-morrow than this, Lot Gordon?”

“Quit your talk!” shouted David Hautville; and she followed his fierce leading out of the house into the yard.

“Get ye into this sleigh,” ordered her father; and she obeyed. Suddenly the fire of passion and revolt seemed to die out in her; it was like a lull in a spiritual storm. She rode home with her father, and neither spoke. David Hautville now considered the matter as past any words of reasoning. He was convinced that his daughter's fair wits were shaken, and that nothing but summary dealing, as with a child, could avail anything. When they reached home he bade her, with a kind of stern forbearance, to get into the house at once and see to her work there, and she obeyed again.

All that day, and many days after that, poor Madelon Hautville, who had been striving like any warrior against the powers and principalities of human wills and passions, and had grounded her arms after a victory which had left her wounded almost to death, carried her bleeding heart and walked her woman's treadmill. She scoured faithfully the pewter dishes and the iron pots. She swept the hearth clean and baked and brewed and spun and sewed. Her lot would have been easier had her woe befallen her generations before, and she could, instead, have backed her heavy load of tenting through the snow on wild hunting-parties, and broken the ice on the river for fish, and perchance taken a hand at the defence when the males of her tribe were hard pressed. Civilization bowed cruelly this girl, who felt in greater measure than the gently staid female descendants of the Puritan stock around her the fire of savage or primitive passions; but she now submitted to it with the taciturnity of one of her ancestresses to the torture. Week after week she went about the house, and neither spoke nor smiled. Burr Gordon was set free, fully acquitted of the charge against him; Madelon's denial of Lot's false confession had gone for nothing. Half the village considered her hysterical and irresponsible, and Lot Gordon, it was agreed, was just the man to lay violent hands upon his own life, steal and use his cousin's knife, and keep mute to fasten the guilt upon him, as he had confessed.

A week after Burr's release Louis and Richard Hautville came home. They had been trapping on Green Mountain, they said, camping in the little lodge they had built there. When they came in laden with stark white rabbits and limp-necked birds, and one of them with a haunch of venison on his back, Madelon faced them with sudden fierceness, as if to speak. Then she turned away to her work, without a word of greeting. The boy Richard stared at her with a quiver, as of coming tears on his handsome face. He whispered to Eugene, when she went into the pantry.