“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.