“I have been buying them and treasuring them, against the time you would have them, for years,” pleaded Lot.

“I tell you I will not have them,” said she.

That day, as the day before, he called her back again and again, and looked at her as if he had something on his mind which he would and could not say; and she went home at last resolved not to go again until she was obliged to for the marriage ceremony.

The next day was Sunday, and Madelon went to meeting and sang, as usual.  Burr was not there, but pretty Dorothy was, and looked up at Madelon with a kind of wondering alarm when she sang.  Madelon had the heart of one who sings her death-song, and there was something of it in her face that morning.  Unconsciously people looked past her, when her voice rang out, to see some dead wall of horror at her back to account for the strange tones in it and the look in her face.  She had never looked handsomer, however, than she did that day.  Her cheeks had the bloom of roses, and her black eyes seemed to give out their own light, like stars.

She held up her head like a queen as she sang, and her wonderful voice sounded through and beyond the viols and violins, and all the other singing voices.  The agony within her was great to penetrate the consciousness of others through this fair triumphant mask.

Madelon looked better than her rival that morning.  Dorothy sat, as usual, daintily clad in her Sabbath silks and swan’s-downs, with a sweet atmosphere as of a flower around her; but her delicate color had faded, and her blue eyes looked as if she had been weeping and had not slept.  She never glanced once at Eugene Hautville up in the singing-seats; but sometimes he looked at her, and then her face quivered under his eyes.

That noon Lot Gordon sent again for Madelon, but this time she refused to go.  “Tell him I am busy and can’t come,” she told Margaret Bean’s husband, who had brought the note.  The old man went off, muttering over her message to himself lest he forget it.  She heard him repeating it in a childish sing-song—­“Tell him I’m busy and can’t come; tell him I’m busy and can’t come”—­as he went out of the yard, slanting his old body before the south wind.  The wind blew from the south that day in great gusts as warm as summer; the air was full of the sounds of running water, of sweet, interrupted tinkles and sudden gurgles and steady outpourings as from a thousand pitchers.  The snow was going fast; here and there were bare patches that showed a green shimmer across the wind.  Sometimes spring comes with a rush to New England on the 1st of April.

That afternoon Madelon went to meeting and sang again, and when she got home Margaret Bean was waiting for her, sitting, a motionless, swaddled figure, beside a window.  The Hautvilles never locked their doors while away from home, and she had walked in and waited at her ease until Madelon should return.

Madelon came in alone; her father, Abner, and Eugene had stopped in the barn to look after the roan, who had gone somewhat lame in one foot, and Louis and Richard had lagged.  Margaret Bean stood up when Madelon entered.