f Dexter Beers another horse to drive to Kingston. But he
refused her, standing before her, blocking the stable door, looking
aside with a kind of timid doggedness. "Can't let ye have another
horse to-day nohow," said he; "too cold to let 'em out."

"I'll pay you well," said Madelon.

"Pay ain't no object. Can't let none of 'em out but the stage-horses
in no sech weather as this." Still Dexter Beers did not look at
Madelon's stern and angry eyes; he gazed intently at a post in an icy
slant of snow in the yard on the left.

He had the usual masculine dread of an angry woman, and, moreover, he
had a sharp-tongued wife, but he had also the masculine tenacity of a
position. He stared at the post as if his spirit held fast to it, and
braced itself against the torrent of feminine wrath which he
expected; but it did not come. Madelon Hautville set her mouth hard,
wrapped her red cloak around her with a firm gesture, as if she were
a soldier about to start on a long march, and walked out of the yard
and up the road without another word.

"I swan!" said Dexter Beers.

The red-faced hostler approached with a pail in each hand bound for
the well; he was watering the coach-horses for the next relay.
"What's up?" he inquired, pushing past him.

"I'll be darned if I don't believe that gal of Hautville's has
started to walk to Kingston, 'cause I wouldn't let her have another
horse!"

"Let her go it," droned the red-faced man, with a short chuckle.

"Hope she won't freeze her feet nor nothin'," said Dexter Beers,
uneasily.

"Let her _go_ it!" said the red-faced man, swinging across the yard
with his pails.

Madelon Hautville walked on steadily. She reached the right-hand
turn, and then she was on the direct Kingston road, with a ten-mile
stretch before her. It was past one o'clock, and she could not reach
her journey's end much before dark.

About two miles after the turn of the road the more thickly set
habitations ceased, and there were only isolated farm-houses, with
long, sloping reaches of woods and pasture-lands between. The
pasture-lands were hummocked with ice-coated rocks and hooped with
frozen vines; they seemed to flow down in glittering waves, like
glaciers, over the hill-sides. The woods stood white and petrified,
as woods might have done in a glacial era. There was no sound in them
except now and then the crack of a bough under the weight of ice, and
slow, painful responses, like the twangs of rusty harp-s