On the morning of the next day everything was still.  The snow lay transfixed in blue whirlpools around the trees; the fields were full of frozen eddies, and the hill-tops curled with white wave-crests which never broke.  There was a dead calm, and the mercury was fourteen degrees below zero.  Everything seemed in the white region of death after the delirium of storm.  That morning Madelon Hautville, after her household tasks were done, sat down again to sew her wedding-dress.  The silk was of changeable tints, and flashed in patches of green and gold as it lay over her knee and swept around her to the floor.

All the others had gone, but presently, as she sewed, Richard came in with some parcels.  He had been on an errand to the store.  He tossed the packages on the dresser, then he went and stood directly in front of his sister, looking at her.

“I want to know if it’s true,” said he.

Then Madelon knew that he had heard.  “Yes,” said she.

“And that is—­” Richard pointed at the silk.

“Yes.”

Richard continued to look at his sister and the gorgeous silk.  There was consternation in his look, and withal a certain relief.  Boy as he was, he reasoned it out astutely.  If Madelon married Lot Gordon the merest shadow of suspicion that her confession had been true would not cling to her, and Richard hated Burr, and was fiercely triumphant that he should not think his sister dying for love of him; and then Burr would lose the Gordon money.

All at once Madelon rose up, let her silk breadths slip rustling to the floor, and took Richard by the shoulder.  “Richard,” she said, “why could you not have told the truth about the knife, and not forced me to this?  Why could you not?”

The boy looked aside from her doggedly.  “I don’t know what you mean about a knife,” said he, but his voice shook.

“Yes, you do know, Richard!  It is all over now.  I must marry Lot.  I have promised.  I shall not try to escape it—­I shall not try again to make people believe it was I. If you were to tell the truth now it would do no good.  But you must tell me this, Richard.  How came Burr Gordon’s knife there instead of yours?”

The boy hesitated.

“Richard, you know you can trust me.”

“Well,” said Richard, slowly, in a low voice, “I came right up behind Burr before you were hardly out of sight.  I’d got uneasy about your going home alone, and I’d thought I’d follow you unbeknown to you, and turn ’round and go back when you were safe in sight of home.  Burr pulled my knife out of the wound quick and wiped it on the snow.  ‘Take it quick,’ says he, and I knew what he meant, and put it in my pocket, and slid out of sight in the bushes; and then he whipped out his knife and laid it in the pool of blood, and the others came up, and ’twas all done in a second.  That’s how.”

“He did it to save me,” said Madelon, and her voice was fuller of exultant sweetness than it had ever been in a song.