Still Madelon stood staring at her.  Then presently she began unfastening her hood and cloak.  “If you can keep me till morning I shall be obliged,” she said, with a kind of stern gratitude.

“Stay just as well as not!” cried Mrs. Otis.  “Jim, just take her things and lay ’em in the bedroom.  Then you have her set right down close to the hearth, and get all warmed through, while I get supper.”

Handsome young Jim Otis stood by with his brows knit moodily while Madelon Hautville removed her wraps, then took them over his arm, and conducted her to the warm seat in the hearth-corner which his mother designated.

In his heart he judged this girl whom he was defending to be guilty, yet was full of intensest admiration, and was sorely torn between the two and his own remorse over his false witnessing.  “If I’m called into court and sworn on the Bible, I won’t own up that I saw her take that knife,” he muttered to himself, as he laid the red cloak and hood on the high feather-bed in his mother’s room.

This handsome, stalwart young man, who had hitherto been considered full of a gay audacity where womenfolk were concerned, able to make almost any pretty girl flutter at his smile, was strangely abashed before this beautiful Madelon Hautville, stained, in his eyes, with crime.  He brought in wood and mended the hearth fire; he moved about doing such household tasks as were allotted to his masculine hands, and scarcely let his eyes rest once upon the girl in the chimney-corner.  He dreaded the sight of that beautiful face which gave him such a shock of pity and admiration and horror.  Jim Otis’s mind could not compass this new revelation of a woman, but he would not betray her even for her own pleading if he went down perjured to his grave.  So valiant was he in her defence that he withstood her against her own self.

Madelon’s mother had died when she was a little girl.  She could not fairly remember that ever in her whole life she had been so tended and petted as she was that night by Jim Otis’s mother.  Kind indeed her father and her brothers had always been to her.  They had watched over her with jealous fondness, and had taken all rougher tasks upon themselves, but the devotion of woman, which extends to all the minor details of life, she had never known.

She had never had a supper-table set out for her own especial pleasure with this and that dish to tempt her appetite, as Mrs. Otis set out hers that night.  A dish of a fine and sublimated porridge did Mrs. Otis make for her—­a porridge mixed with cream and sprinkled with nutmeg and fat plums.  “I thought some hot porridge would do you good,” said Mrs. Otis, when she sat the smoking bowl before Madelon.  Then she whispered low, that her son, who was putting another stick on the fire before coming to table, might not hear, “It’s the same kind of porridge I had after my son was born—­with cream and plums in it.  I used to think there never was anything so good.”  This porridge might well have possessed a flavor of the sweetest memories of motherhood to the older woman, but to the girl, wild with longing to be gone and carry out her purpose, manna from heaven would not have yielded its full measure of sweetness.