As for Jim Otis, he slewed his sleigh about recklessly, and shook the whip over the little mare, and drove up the road.  When he reached the turn which he knew led to the Hautville house he drew rein, and sat pondering in his sleigh for a few minutes.  He was in doubt whether he should inform Eugene Hautville of his sister’s whereabouts or not.  Finally he spoke to the mare, and continued on his way to Kingston.

The terraces which Madelon mounted were all covered with the gathering snow.  When she reached the last the door was opened, and Burr Gordon’s mother, Elvira, stood there.  “I am sorry there’s so much snow for you to wade through,” said she, in a sweet, quiet voice.

“I don’t mind it, thank you,” replied Madelon, harshly.  She felt incensed with this mother of Burr’s, who came to the door and greeted her as if she were an ordinary caller, and her son were not in prison.

“You had better shake it off your skirts or you’ll take cold,” said Mrs. Gordon.

“I am not afraid,” returned Madelon.  She gave her skirts a careless flirt and entered the door with the snow still clinging to her.

“If you will wait a moment,” said Mrs. Gordon, “I will get a broom and brush the snow from you before it melts.  Then you won’t take cold.”

“I don’t care to have you, thank you,” said Madelon.  Mrs. Gordon said no more, but led the way to the sitting-room.  She was a tall, slender woman with the face of a saint, long and pale, and full of gentle melancholy, with large, meek-lidded blue eyes and patiently compressed lips.  She had a habit of folding her long hands always before her, whether she walked or sat, and she moved with sinuous wavings of her widow-bombazine.

The room into which she ushered Madelon was accounted the grandest sitting-room in the village.  When Burr’s father had built his fine new house he had made the furnishings correspond.  He had eschewed the spindle-legged tables and fiddle-backed chairs of the former generations, and taken to solid masses of red mahogany, which were impressive to the village folk.  The carpet was a tapestry of great crimson roses with the like of which no other floor in town was covered, and, moreover, there was a glossy black stove instead of a hearth fire.

“Please be seated,” said Mrs. Gordon.  She indicated the best chair in the room.  When her guest had taken it, she sat down herself in the middle of her great haircloth sofa, and folded her long hands in her lap.  Mrs. Gordon had the extremest manners of the old New England gentlewoman—­so punctiliously polite that they called attention to themselves.  She had married late in life, having been previously a preceptress in a young ladies’ school.  She was still the example of her own precepts—­all outward decorum if not inward composure.

Madelon Hautville, opposite her, in her snow-powdered cloak, with her face like a flash of white fire in her snow-powdered silk hood, seemed in comparison a female of another and an older race.  She might well, from the look of her, have come a nearer and straighter road from the inmost heart of things, from the unpruned tangle of woods and undammed course of streams, from all primitive and untempered love and passion and religion, than this gentlewoman formed upon the models of creeds and scholars.