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!”