“Get ye out of this,” growled David Hautville; but Madelon turned her face back in the doorway for one last word.  “Don’t you know,” she shrieked back to Lot Gordon, in her pitiless despair—­“don’t you know that I would rather have seen the inside of my prison-cell to-night and the gallows to-morrow than this, Lot Gordon?”

“Quit your talk!” shouted David Hautville; and she followed his fierce leading out of the house into the yard.

“Get ye into this sleigh,” ordered her father; and she obeyed.  Suddenly the fire of passion and revolt seemed to die out in her; it was like a lull in a spiritual storm.  She rode home with her father, and neither spoke.  David Hautville now considered the matter as past any words of reasoning.  He was convinced that his daughter’s fair wits were shaken, and that nothing but summary dealing, as with a child, could avail anything.  When they reached home he bade her, with a kind of stern forbearance, to get into the house at once and see to her work there, and she obeyed again.

All that day, and many days after that, poor Madelon Hautville, who had been striving like any warrior against the powers and principalities of human wills and passions, and had grounded her arms after a victory which had left her wounded almost to death, carried her bleeding heart and walked her woman’s treadmill.  She scoured faithfully the pewter dishes and the iron pots.  She swept the hearth clean and baked and brewed and spun and sewed.  Her lot would have been easier had her woe befallen her generations before, and she could, instead, have backed her heavy load of tenting through the snow on wild hunting-parties, and broken the ice on the river for fish, and perchance taken a hand at the defence when the males of her tribe were hard pressed.  Civilization bowed cruelly this girl, who felt in greater measure than the gently staid female descendants of the Puritan stock around her the fire of savage or primitive passions; but she now submitted to it with the taciturnity of one of her ancestresses to the torture.  Week after week she went about the house, and neither spoke nor smiled.  Burr Gordon was set free, fully acquitted of the charge against him; Madelon’s denial of Lot’s false confession had gone for nothing.  Half the village considered her hysterical and irresponsible, and Lot Gordon, it was agreed, was just the man to lay violent hands upon his own life, steal and use his cousin’s knife, and keep mute to fasten the guilt upon him, as he had confessed.

A week after Burr’s release Louis and Richard Hautville came home.  They had been trapping on Green Mountain, they said, camping in the little lodge they had built there.  When they came in laden with stark white rabbits and limp-necked birds, and one of them with a haunch of venison on his back, Madelon faced them with sudden fierceness, as if to speak.  Then she turned away to her work, without a word of greeting.  The boy Richard stared at her with a quiver, as of coming tears on his handsome face.  He whispered to Eugene, when she went into the pantry.