unsteady and hoarse when she spoke to Madelon on the
threshold of the outer door, although the words were still gently
formal. "I am grateful to you for the interest you take in my son,"
she said; "I hope you will not excite yourself so much that you will
be ill."

"I will die if that can save him," answered Madelon Hautville, and
went down the snowy steps over the terraces.

Elvira Gordon, when she had closed the door, drew the bolt softly.
Truth was, she thought the girl had gone mad through grief and love
for her son. Believing, as she did, that the love was all unsought
and unreturned, and being also shocked in all her delicate decorum by
such unmaidenly violence and self-betrayal, she regarded Madelon with
a strange mixture of scorn and sympathy and fear.

Moreover, not one word did she believe of Madelon's assertion that
she herself was guilty. "She is accusing herself to save my son,"
thought Elvira Gordon, and her heart seemed to leap after the girl
with half-shamed gratitude, in spite of her astonishment and terror,
as she watched her go out of the yard and across the road to Lot
Gordon's house. Mrs. Gordon stood at one of the narrow lights beside
her front door and watched until Madelon entered the opposite house;
then she went hastily through her fine sitting-room to her own
bedroom, and there went down on her knees, and all her icy constraint
melted into a very passion of weeping and prayer. Those placidly
folded hands of hers clutched at the poor mother-bosom in the fury of
her grief; those placid-lidded eyes welled over with scalding tears;
that calmly set mouth was convulsed like a wailing child's, and all
the rigorous lines of her whole body were relaxed into overborne
curves of agony. "Oh, my son, my son, my son!" lamented Elvira
Gordon. "Have mercy, have mercy, O Father in heaven! Let him be
proved innocent! Let Lot Gordon live! Oh, my son!"

Elvira Gordon had the stern pride of justice of a Brutus. She would
not without proof discover even to the passionate pleading of her own
heart that she believed her son innocent, but believe it she did.
Every breath she drew was a prayer that Lot Gordon might yet speak
and clear Burr. This morning she had some slight hope that that might
come to pass, for the sick man had passed a comfortable night except
for his old enemy, the cough.

"It's my belief," Margaret Bean had told Elvira, when she had sped
across the road in the early morning to inquire, "that i