“I will make it.  Get your shawl, quick.”

“It ain’t b’iled.”

“I tell you I will make it.”

“Why can’t he go to both places?”

“I will go myself!” Madelon cried, suddenly.  She had been bewildered, or that would have occurred to her before.  She had never been one to send where she could go, but for the time Lot Gordon’s will had overcome hers.  “Tell your husband to go to the parson’s and the sheriff’s, quick, and I will go for the doctor,” said she, and was flashing out of the yard in her red cloak before Margaret Bean had time to turn herself about from the prospect of her own going.  Then she ordered her husband imperiously into his boots and great-coat and tippet, and sent him forth.

She finished the gruel, and took it in to the sick man, and fed him with hard thrusts of the spoon.  Lot looked about feebly for Madelon, and Margaret Bean replied to the look, in her husky voice, “She’s gone, instead of me.  I’ve got rheumatism too bad to venture out in such a storm and get my petticoats bedraggled.”  She spoke with a little whine of defiant crying, but Lot took no notice.  He was exhausted.  After he had eaten the gruel, he pointed to the chimney-cupboard.

“What is it ye want?” said she.

Lot pointed.

“How do I know what ye want when ye jest p’int like that?”

But there came then a look into Lot Gordon’s eyes as expressive as a word, and Margaret Bean crossed over to the chimney-cupboard, and got out the brandy-flask and a wine-glass and some loaf-sugar.  She mixed a little dose of the brandy and sugar, and would have fed it to the sick man as she had the gruel, but he motioned her aside, raised himself with an effort, and drank it down eagerly.  Then he lay still, and soon a faint flush came into his face.  Margaret Bean went back into the kitchen and mixed some bread, with her eye upon the window.

Presently there was a wild gallop and great clash of bells past the window, and a shout at the door.  Margaret Bean put on her little blue shawl and opened it when the shout had been twice repeated.  Old David Hautville sat there in his sleigh, keeping a tight rein on his tugging roan.  “My daughter here?” he shouted.  “Whoa, there!”

“There’s sick folks here,” said Margaret Bean, shivering in the doorway.  “You hadn’t ought to holler so.”  Her tearful eyes were more frankly hostile than usual.  She had always looked down from her own slight eminence of life upon these Hautvilles, and now was full of scorn that her master was to marry one of them.

“I want to know if my daughter is here,” said David Hautville, and he did not lower his voice.  It sounded like a hoarse bellow of wrath, coming out of the white whirl of snow.  His fur coat was all crusted with snow, his great mustache heavy with it; the roan plunged in a rising cloud of it.

“No, she ain’t here,” replied Margaret Bean, and her weak voice seemed by its very antithesis to express the utmost scorn and disgust at the brutality of the other.