The wind blew from the icy northwest more frequently in fiercer gusts.  Madelon Hautville sped along before it, her red cloak flying out like a flag, and took no thought of it at all.  She was, while still in the flesh and upon the earth, so intensified in spirit that there existed for her consciousness neither heat nor cold.  She reached the old road, the short-cut, stretched down through the stiff white woods to her own home; she hastened along it a little way, then she stopped and faced back and stood irresolute.  The icy wind stiffened her face, but she did not note it.  She looked back at the road with its blue snow-furrows stretching between the desolate woods, at the spires and roofs of the village beyond.  If one followed that road to the village and took the first one upon the right, and travelled ten miles, one would come to the town of Kingston.

Madelon began moving along on the road to the village, vaguely at first, as if half in a dream, then with gathering purpose.  Back she went, in her tracks, straight to the village and the tavern stable, and asked of Dexter Beers another horse to drive to Kingston.  But he refused her, standing before her, blocking the stable door, looking aside with a kind of timid doggedness.  “Can’t let ye have another horse to-day nohow,” said he; “too cold to let ’em out.”

“I’ll pay you well,” said Madelon.

“Pay ain’t no object.  Can’t let none of ’em out but the stage-horses in no sech weather as this.”  Still Dexter Beers did not look at Madelon’s stern and angry eyes; he gazed intently at a post in an icy slant of snow in the yard on the left.

He had the usual masculine dread of an angry woman, and, moreover, he had a sharp-tongued wife, but he had also the masculine tenacity of a position.  He stared at the post as if his spirit held fast to it, and braced itself against the torrent of feminine wrath which he expected; but it did not come.  Madelon Hautville set her mouth hard, wrapped her red cloak around her with a firm gesture, as if she were a soldier about to start on a long march, and walked out of the yard and up the road without another word.

“I swan!” said Dexter Beers.

The red-faced hostler approached with a pail in each hand bound for the well; he was watering the coach-horses for the next relay.  “What’s up?” he inquired, pushing past him.

“I’ll be darned if I don’t believe that gal of Hautville’s has started to walk to Kingston, ’cause I wouldn’t let her have another horse!”

“Let her go it,” droned the red-faced man, with a short chuckle.

“Hope she won’t freeze her feet nor nothin’,” said Dexter Beers, uneasily.

“Let her go it!” said the red-faced man, swinging across the yard with his pails.

Madelon Hautville walked on steadily.  She reached the right-hand turn, and then she was on the direct Kingston road, with a ten-mile stretch before her.  It was past one o’clock, and she could not reach her journey’s end much before dark.