Madelon opened the letter and read it.  “I can’t come,” she said, shortly.  “I’m busy.  Tell him he must write what he wants to tell me.”

Margaret Bean’s eyes were sharp as steel points.  She had not known what was in the letter.  “Hey?” said she, pretending that she had not heard, in order to make Madelon repeat and perhaps reveal more.

“I can’t come,” said Madelon.  “He can write what he wants to tell me.”

Suddenly a great red flush spread over her pale face and her neck.  She lowered her eyes before the other woman as if in utter degradation of shame, and shrank back into the house and closed the door in Margaret Bean’s face.

Margaret Bean stood for a moment, a silent, shapeless figure in the cold air.  “Pretty actions, I call it,” said she then, quite loudly, and went out of the yard with a curious tilting motion on slender ankles, as of a balancing bale of wool.

Madelon slipped her letter into her pocket as she entered the kitchen.  Her father and all her brothers were there.  It was shortly after breakfast, and they had not yet gone out.

“Who was it at the door?” her father asked.  He sat by the fire in his great boots.

“Margaret Bean.”

“What did she want?”

“Lot Gordon sent for me to come over there.”

“What for?”

“He wanted—­to—­tell me something.”

“You ain’t going a step.  I can tell ye that.”

“I—­told her I couldn’t go,” said Madelon.  Her voice was almost breathless, and still that red of shame was over her face.  She bent her head and turned her back to them all, and went out of the room.  The male Hautvilles looked at one another.  “What’s come over the girl now?” said Abner, in his surly bass growl.

“She’s a woman,” said his father, and he stamped his booted feet on the floor with a great clamp.

Madelon meantime fled up-stairs to her chamber, with her first love-letter from Lot Gordon in her pocket.  Until this the reality of all that had happened had not fully come home to her.  Without acknowledging it to herself she had entertained a half-hope that Lot might not have been entirely in earnest—­that he might not hold her to her promise.  And then there had been the uncertainty as to his recovery.  But here was this letter, in which Lot Gordon called her—­her, Madelon Hautville—­his sweetheart, and begged her to come to him, as he had something of importance to say to her!  He used, moreover, terms of endearment which thrilled her with the stinging shame of lashes upon her bare shoulders at the public whipping-post.  She lit the candle on her table, snatched the letter out of her pocket, crumpled it fiercely as if it were some live thing that she would crush the life out of, and then held it to the candle-flame until it burned away, and the last flashes of it scorched her fingers.  Then she caught a sight of her own miserable, shamed face in her looking-glass, and flushed redder and struck herself in her face angrily, and then fell to walking up and down her little room.