chard! It is all over now. I must marry Lot. I
have promised. I shall not try to escape it--I shall not try again to
make people believe it was I. If you were to tell the truth now it
would do no good. But you must tell me this, Richard. How came Burr
Gordon's knife there instead of yours?"

The boy hesitated.

"Richard, you know you can trust me."

"Well," said Richard, slowly, in a low voice, "I came right up behind
Burr before you were hardly out of sight. I'd got uneasy about your
going home alone, and I'd thought I'd follow you unbeknown to you,
and turn 'round and go back when you were safe in sight of home. Burr
pulled my knife out of the wound quick and wiped it on the snow.
'Take it quick,' says he, and I knew what he meant, and put it in my
pocket, and slid out of sight in the bushes; and then he whipped out
his knife and laid it in the pool of blood, and the others came up,
and 'twas all done in a second. That's how."

"He did it to save me," said Madelon, and her voice was fuller of
exultant sweetness than it had ever been in a song.

"He's a rascal, that's what he is!" said Richard. "If he hadn't
treated you so, it wouldn't ever have happened."

"He did it to save me," said Madelon, as if to herself; "it's worth
all I'm going to do to save him." She sat down again, and took up
her wedding-dress, and resumed sewing. Richard stood looking at her a
minute; then he got his gun off the hooks where he kept it, put on
his fur cap, and went out.

Madelon sat and sewed, in a broad slant of wintry sunshine, for an
hour longer. Then a shadow passed suddenly athwart the floor, the
door opened, and Burr Gordon was in the room. He came straight across
to her, but she sat still and drew her needle through her
wedding-silk.

"Madelon!" he cried out, "is this true that I have just heard?
Madelon!"--Burr Gordon's handsome face was white as death, and he
breathed hard, as if he had been running--"Madelon! tell me, for
God's sake, is it--true?"

"Yes," said Madelon. She took another stitch. The self-restraint of
her New England mother was upon her then. Burr Gordon, betrothed to
Dorothy Fair, loving her not, yet still noble enough and kind enough
to have perilled his life to save hers, should know nothing of the
greater sacrifice she was making for him.

"You are going to marry--Lot?"

"Yes."

"Oh, my God!"

Burr Gordon stood a moment looking at the girl sewing the breadths of
shining silk. Then he went ove