Dorothy screamed faintly.  “Sit still and hold on!” Madelon shouted.  Dorothy shut her eyes.  It seemed to her she was being hurled through space.  Her slender body swung to and fro against the sleigh as she clung frantically to it.

Eugene Hautville, on the roan, was coming at a mad run across the open field on the right towards the turn of the road.  It seemed for a second as if Madelon would reach it before he did; but they met there, and the roan reared to a stop in the narrow road directly in front of the old white, who plunged furiously.

“Look out there!” shouted Eugene, as the sleigh tilted on the snow-crust.  The old white’s temper was up at this sudden check, but the woman behind him had a stronger will than he.  She brought him to a straining halt, and then she spoke to her brother.

“You let us pass!” she said, sternly.

“Where are you going?” he demanded.  He looked uneasily at Dorothy as he spoke.  It was easy enough to see that she was a restraint upon him, and that fair, timid face in its blue hood held his indignation well in check.

“We are going to New Salem,” replied Madelon.  “Let us pass.”

“I want to know what you are going for,” said Eugene; and he tried to speak with fire, but he still looked furtively at Dorothy.

Nobody had ever suspected how that lovely face of hers had been in his dreams, unless it had been for a time Dorothy herself.  Nobody had noticed in meeting, of a Sabbath day long since, when Dorothy had first returned from her Boston school, sundry glances which had passed between a pair of soft blue eyes in the parson’s pew and a pair of fiery black ones in the singing-seats.

Dorothy, half guiltily in those days, had arranged her curls and tied on her Sunday bonnets with a view to Eugene Hautville’s eyes; and always, when she returned from meeting, had gone straight to her looking-glass, to be sure that she had looked fair in them.  But nobody had ever known, and scarcely she herself.

She had come to think later that she had perhaps been mistaken, for never had Eugene made other advances to her than by those ardent glances; and Burr had come, and she had turned to him, and thought of Eugene Hautville only when he crossed her way, and then with a mixture of pique and shame.  Never by any chance did her eyes meet his nowadays of a Sabbath day, and she listened coldly to his sweet tenor in the hymns.  Now, suddenly, she looked straight up in his face and met his eyes, and a pink flush came into her white cheeks.

“Please to let us pass,” she said, in her gentle tone, which had yet a tincture of command in it.  Any woman as fair as she, who has a right understanding of her looking-glass, has, however soft she may be, the instincts of a queen within her.  She felt a proud resentment for her own old folly and for Eugene’s old slighting of her, and indignation at his present attitude as she looked up at him with sudden daring.