s, but the devotion of woman, which extends to all the minor
details of life, she had never known.

She had never had a supper-table set out for her own especial
pleasure with this and that dish to tempt her appetite, as Mrs. Otis
set out hers that night. A dish of a fine and sublimated porridge did
Mrs. Otis make for her--a porridge mixed with cream and sprinkled
with nutmeg and fat plums. "I thought some hot porridge would do you
good," said Mrs. Otis, when she sat the smoking bowl before Madelon.
Then she whispered low, that her son, who was putting another stick
on the fire before coming to table, might not hear, "It's the same
kind of porridge I had after my son was born--with cream and plums in
it. I used to think there never was anything so good." This porridge
might well have possessed a flavor of the sweetest memories of
motherhood to the older woman, but to the girl, wild with longing to
be gone and carry out her purpose, manna from heaven would not have
yielded its full measure of sweetness.

She would scarcely have eaten at all had not Jim Otis's mother
remarked, as she watched her reluctant sips of the good porridge, "As
I said just now, you ain't any daughter of mine, and I ain't any
right to dictate, but if you want to get that man, whoever he is, out
of prison, you'll have to eat enough to get some strength to do it."

Simply placid as Mrs. Otis looked, she had often wisdom enough to
gain her ends by means of that shrewd finesse of government which
appeals to the reason of others as applied to the furthering of their
own desires.

Madelon after that swallowed her porridge almost greedily, and when
supper was over went up-stairs to bed, following Mrs. Otis as readily
as any meek young daughter of her own might have done. The spirit of
resistance was laid for the time in this poor Madelon Hautville, but
it had yielded, after all, more to the will of her own reason than to
Jim Otis's mother or the weariness of her own flesh.

When Mrs. Otis came down-stairs she was flushed with pleasant
motherly victory. "She's drunk all that hot cordial," she said to her
son, "every drop of it, and I've tucked her into bed with the extra
comfortables over her, an' she eat quite a good supper, an' I told
her to go right to sleep, and I guess she will."

"If she don't she'll be down sick," said Jim, sternly. He sat by the
fire, tuning his fiddle.

"She can't hear your fiddle so it'll keep her awake, can she?" asked