Madelon Hautville--his sweetheart, and begged her to come
to him, as he had something of importance to say to her! He used,
moreover, terms of endearment which thrilled her with the stinging
shame of lashes upon her bare shoulders at the public whipping-post.
She lit the candle on her table, snatched the letter out of her
pocket, crumpled it fiercely as if it were some live thing that she
would crush the life out of, and then held it to the candle-flame
until it burned away, and the last flashes of it scorched her
fingers. Then she caught a sight of her own miserable, shamed face in
her looking-glass, and flushed redder and struck herself in her face
angrily, and then fell to walking up and down her little room.

Her father and brothers down below heard her, and looked at each
other.

"There was that Emmeline Littlefield that went mad, and fell to
walking all the time," said Abner.

The others listened to the footsteps overhead with a gloomy assent of
silence.

"They had to keep her in a room with an iron grate on the window,"
said Abner, further, with a pale scowl.

Then David Hautville took down his leather jacket from its peg with a
jerk, and thrust his arm into it. "I tell ye, she's a _woman_," he
said, in a shout, as if to drown out those hurrying steps; and then
he went out of the room and the house, and disappeared with axe on
shoulder across the snowy reach of fields; and presently all his sons
except Eugene followed him. Eugene remained to keep watch over his
sister.

Chapter XV

After his father and brothers were gone, Eugene got Louis's fiddle
out of the chimney-cupboard and fell to playing with an imperfect
touch, picking out a tune slowly, with halts between the strains, as
if he spelled a word with stammering syllables. Eugene's musical
expression was in his throat alone; his fingers were almost powerless
to bring out the meaning of sweet sounds. A drunken crew on a rolling
vessel might have danced to the tune that Eugene Hautville fingered
on his brother's fiddle that morning while his sister walked back and
forth overhead, running the gantlet, as it were, of an agony which
his masculine imagination could not compass, well tutored as it was
by the lessons of his Shakespeare book.

When Margaret Bean came to the door the second time she heard the
squeak of the fiddle, and clanged the knocker loud to overcome it.
Madelon and Eugene reached the door at the same time, and Margaret
Bean ext