Yet he saw only the tip of her little shoe below the blue hem of her gown, and dared not fairly glance at her face, although he bore himself with such calm ease that none could have suspected.

“It is a beautiful day,” said Eugene.

“Yes,” whispered Dorothy.  Somehow for the moment Eugene forgot Dorothy’s marriage, and Burr and his bitter jealousy, for suddenly a strange and unwarrantable sense of possession came over him.  He looked fully at Dorothy, and scanned her drooping face, and smiled, and then Madelon came in.

Dorothy arose at once and greeted her with more of her usual manner.  Then she fumbled uneasily with a little parcel she held, and glanced at Eugene, and then at Madelon.  “I had an errand—­” began Dorothy and stopped, and then Eugene said softly, still smiling, “I see you have some weighty matter to discuss,” and bowed himself out with his Shakespeare book.

Then Dorothy, all trembling, and before he was fairly out of hearing across the entry in the other room, announced her errand.  She had come to beg Madelon, whose rare skill in embroidering her own floral designs was celebrated in the village, to work for her the front breadth of one of her silken gowns with a garland of red roses.  “I can work only from patterns which are marked out,” said Dorothy; and then she held up a shining length of green silk upon which the garland already bloomed in her pretty feminine fancy.  “I will pay you whatever you ask,” said Dorothy, further.  Then she started and shrank, for Madelon looked at her with such wrath and pride in her black eyes that she was frightened.

“What—­have—­I—­done?” she faltered, piteously.  And it was quite true that she did not know what she had done, for she reasoned always like a child, with premises of acts only and not of motives.  She considered simply that Madelon had urged her to be true to Burr, and was herself to marry another man, and therefore could not be jealous, and that she wanted her gown embroidered.

Dorothy was not happy, and a nervous terror was always upon her which had caused her blue eyes to look out wistfully from delicate hollows and faded the soft pink on her cheeks; still she kept involuntarily to her feminine ways, and wanted her gowns embroidered.

“I want no pay!” Madelon cried, hoarsely.

“I meant no harm,” Dorothy faltered, again.  She remembered that Madelon Hautville had on divers occasions, for prospective brides, turned her marvellous skill in embroidery to financial profit, but she dared not say so for an excuse.  “I could not do it myself,” Dorothy said, further, trembling in every limb, “and—­I thought maybe—­you—­”

Suddenly Madelon extended her hand.  “Give me this silk,” she said; “I will work the flowers on it for you, but never dare to speak to me of pay, Dorothy Fair.”

Dorothy looked at her, made a motion as to give her the silk, then drew it back again.