She asked no more questions, but waited for him to speak.  “She’s just gone in there,” he half sobbed out, presently.  “Oh, mother, what shall I do—­what shall I do?”

“You’ll have to get used to it,” said his mother.  “You’ll have to make up your mind to it, Burr.”

“Mother, I can’t!  Oh, God, I can’t see her every day there with him.  Mother, we’ve got to sell out and move away.  You’ll be willing to, won’t you?  Won’t you, mother?”

“You forget Dorothy.  She can’t leave the town where her father is.”

“I wish I could forget Dorothy in honor!” Burr cried out.

“You can’t,” said his mother, “and there’s an end of it.”

“I know it,” said Burr.  He got up and stood looking moodily out of the window.

“You know,” said his mother, still knitting, “how I have felt from the very first about Madelon Hautville.  I never approved of her for a wife for you; I approve of her still less now, after her violent conduct and her consent to marry Lot, whom she cannot care for.  Still, since you feel as you do about it, I should be glad to have you marry her, if such a thing could be done with any show of honor; but it cannot.  You know that as well as I. You must marry Dorothy Fair, and Madelon is going to marry Lot.  Leaving everything else out of the question, it is out of your power to say anything on account of the money which you will lose by her marriage with him.  You know what she might think.”

“Curse the money!” Burr cried out.  “Curse the money and the position and all the damned lot of bubbles that come between a man and what’s worth more, and will last!”

“Burr, don’t talk so!”

“I can’t help it, mother.  I mean it.  Curse it, I say, and the infernal weakness that makes a man see double on women’s faces when there’s only one woman in his heart!  Mother, why didn’t you know about that last, so you could tell me when I was a boy?”

His mother colored a little.  “I never taught you to be fickle,” she said, with a kind of shamed bewilderment.

“I never have been fickle.  This is something else worse.”  Burr looked at his mother again, with the old expression of his when he had come in hurt from play.  No matter how long Burr Gordon might live, no matter what brave deeds he might do—­and there was brave stuff in him, for he would have gone to the gallows rather than betray Madelon—­there would always be in him the appeal of a child to the woman who loved him.  “Mother, I don’t know how to bear it,” he said.

“You must bear it like a man.”

“It is hard to bear the consequence of unmanly conduct like a man,” said Burr, shortly; then he went out, as if the old comfort from his mother had failed him.  As for her, she finished heeling her stocking, and then went out into the kitchen and made a pudding that her son loved for his dinner.

Burr went back up-stairs to his cold chamber, and watched for Madelon to come out of Lot’s house.  It seemed to him she was there an eternity, but in reality it was only a half-hour.