She set her mouth hard, and coupled bitterly her own poor wedding-finery with Dorothy Fair’s grand outfit; and yet not for the reason that her Uncle Luke had striven to give her, for she would have held an old ragged blanket of one of her Indian grandmothers like the bridal gown of a queen had Burr been her bridegroom.

Madelon heard the door shut, and knew her tormentor was gone; and after her fine attire was packed away she went down-stairs and about her tasks again.  But she sang no more.  The certainty of the future overcame her like the present, and her short-lived joy or respite was all gone.  When her father and brothers came home at noon they found the old stern quiet in her face, and their suspicions that there had been a rupture with Lot ceased.  They were relieved, but the boy Richard eyed her with furtive pity.  That night he lingered behind the others when they dispersed for the night, and went up to Madelon and threw an arm around her, and laid his cheek against hers.  “Oh, Madelon, I wish—­” he began, and then he caught his breath, and his cheek against hers was wet, and Madelon turned and comforted him, as a woman will turn and comfort a man for even his pity for her sorrow.

“There is no need for you to fret,” she said, with a sort of gentle authority, as if she had been his mother.  “I’ve got my life to live, and I’ve got strength enough to live it.  I shall do well enough.”

Then she put him away from her softly, and went about setting bread to rise.  But he followed beseechingly at her heels, with a little parcel which he had been hiding in a corner of the dresser.  “I bought these for you, with some of my trap money, for a little present,” the boy whispered, piteously; and Madelon smiled at him and took the parcel and opened it, and found therein a pair of fine red-satin shoes.  Then he brightened at the delight which she showed, and went up-stairs to bed, feeling that after all it would be no such hard task for his sister to marry Lot Gordon, and cover her fault of mad temper and her disgrace.  “He likes her so much he will treat her kindly, and she will have a fine house, and plenty of silk gowns, and feathers in her bonnets,” reflected Richard, comfortably, with no more consciousness of his sister’s outlook upon life than if his eyes were turned towards a scene in another world.  Still he loved his sister with all his heart, although he never in his life had seen anything just as she saw it.  He did not dream that Madelon’s calm broke before his red-satin shoes, and that she was sitting alone before the kitchen fire with them in her lap, weeping bitterly.  She was made of stern stuff to endure the worst of things; but, after all, the pitiful little accessories of grief and death are harder to bear without weakening, because all one’s powers of defence are not enlisted against them.  They are sometimes the scouts that kill.

Poor Madelon looked at her brother’s wedding-gift, the little red-satin shoes, in which she could never walk or dance with a merry heart, and her courage almost failed her.  But it was only for a little while.  She rose up and finished setting the bread to rise, and then she went to her chamber and packed away the shoes with the other things in the cedar chest.