“Give me the silk,” said Madelon.  Dorothy yielded up the silk hesitatingly, with a scared and apologetic murmur.  Then she screamed faintly, for Eugene Hautville strode back into the room with a look on his face which she had never seen before.  He snatched the silk out of Madelon’s hand and thrust it roughly into Dorothy’s.

“Take it home,” he said.  “My sister does no work on your wedding-clothes!”

Dorothy gasped and looked at him with wild terror in her blue eyes, and then he caught her in his arms, pressed her yellow head against his breast, and stroked it softly.  “Don’t be afraid,” he said—­and his voice had its wonderful gentle charm again.  “Don’t be afraid, dear child!  I could not harm you if I tried—­not a hard word shall be said to you, sweet!”

“Eugene!” cried Madelon, and her voice seemed to carry wrath like a trumpet.  She laid hold of his shoulders, and forced him back, and Dorothy slipped out of his arms and stood aside, trembling and weeping, with a little worked apron which she wore thrown over her face.  “Let me be!” Eugene cried, angrily, and would have gone to Dorothy again to comfort her, but Madelon in her wrath was as strong as he, and she thrust herself between them.

“You are no brother of mine, Eugene Hautville,” she said, her face all white and fierce with anger.  “You dare to touch her again, and you will find out that I can fight to keep her from you as well as Burr could if he were here.  You dare to touch her again!” Then she turned to Dorothy.  “Give me the silk,” she said, in a hard voice.  In her heart she blamed her more than her brother, although unnecessarily.

Dorothy shrank back.  “No,” she said, feebly, “I had better not.”

“Give me the silk!”

Dorothy gave her the silk.  Eugene stood apart.  He possessed his fine pride and graceful self-poise again, and though his blood boiled he would not, being a man, wrestle with his sister for another man’s bride.

Dorothy moved towards the door, her fair curls drooping over her agitated face.  Eugene made a motion in her direction, and when Madelon would have thrust him back again, he only said, with a half-smile, “I would crave the lady’s pardon; you would not prevent that.”  And then he bowed low before Dorothy Fair, and besought her to pardon, if she could, his unseemly conduct, and believe that it had for motive only the highest respect and esteem for her.

And Dorothy swept her curls farther over her face, and could not make the dignified response of offended maidenhood that she should, but courtesied tremblingly and fairly fled out of the house.

Eugene, with his Shakespeare book under his arm, went also out of the house and over across the field, to a piney wood he loved, where all the trees, even in this warm flush of spring, whispered eternally of winter and the north, and there he stretched himself out beneath a tree, as melancholy as Jacques in the forest of Arden.  Now that he had got the better of his impulse of mad passion and jealousy, he was ashamed, and stayed late in the wood, for he did not like to meet his sister’s rightly scornful face.