“You’d better come over,” said she.

“Didn’t I tell your husband I couldn’t?” returned Madelon, harshly.

“You’d better, I guess.”

“I’ve got my father’s and brothers’ supper to get, and other things to see to.  Tell him he must leave me in peace to-day, or I’ll never come.”  Madelon’s voice rose high and strident.  She unfastened her cloak as if it choked her.  Margaret looked at her, her small black eyes peering out wrathfully from her swathing woollens.  She was as much wrapped up on this mild day as she had been when the cold was intense.  A certain dogged attitude towards the weather Margaret Bean always took.  On Thanksgiving Day she donned her winter garments; on May Day she exchanged them for her summer ones, regardless of the temperature.  She never made any compromises or concessions.  She sweltered in her full regalia of wools on mild spring days; she weathered the early November blasts in her straw bonnet and silk shawl, without an extra kerchief around her stiff old neck.  To-day she would not loosen her wraps as she sat waiting for Madelon in the warm room, but remained all securely pinned and tied as when she entered.

However, her discomfort, although she would not yield to it, aroused her temper.  “You’d better come,” said she, “or you’ll be sorry.”

Madelon made no reply.

“He’s sick,” said Margaret Bean; “he’s took considerable worse.”  She nodded her head angrily at Madelon.

“Is his cough worse?”

“He can scarcely sit up,” said Margaret Bean, with severe emphasis.  She rose up stiffly, as if she had but one joint, so girt about was she.  “If a woman’s going to marry a man, I calculate it’s her place to go to him when he’s sick and wants her,” she added.

“Is his cough worse?”

“Ain’t his cough bad all the time?  Well, I’m going.  If folks ’ain’t got any feelings, they ’ain’t.  I’ve got to make some porridge for him.”

Madelon opened the door for her.  “I’ll come over after supper,” said she; “you can tell him so.”

After supper Madelon went over to Lot’s in the early twilight.  The tinkles and gurgles and plashes of water came mysteriously from all sides through the dusk.  The hill-sides were flowing with shallow cascades, and the woods were threaded with brooks.  The wind blew strongly as ever from the south; it had lost the warmth of the sun, but was still soft.  The earth was full of a strange commotion and stir—­of disorder changing into order, as if creation had come again.  It might have been the very birthnight of the spring.  Madelon, as she hurried along, felt that memory of old, joyous anticipation which enhances melancholy when the chance of realization is over.  The spring might come, radiant as ever, with its fulfilment of love for flowers and birds and all living things, but the spring would never come in its full meaning, with its old prophecies, for her again.

Just before she reached Lot’s home, Burr passed her swiftly with a muttered “good-evening.”  He was on his way to Dorothy Fair’s.