day." Madelon Hautville spoke with her proud chin raised, and
her eyes as compelling as a queen's; but in spite of herself there
came into her voice the tone of one who counts the days to death.

Her father looked at her sharply. She turned again towards her task
at the table. "Well, Lot Gordon can give ye a good home," said he.
"His health ain't very good, that's the most I see about it. But he
may last a number of years yet--folks in consumption do sometimes;
and I hear he's gettin' over that cut he give himself. I suppose he
did that because he thought you wouldn't have him."

Madelon, moving about the table, did not say a word.

"It must have been that," said David Hautville. "I suppose he thought
you favored--" he was about to speak Burr's name; then he stopped
short. He was usually one to plunge upon dangerous ground, but this
time something stopped him--perhaps a look in his daughter's face. He
laid his pipe carefully on the mantel-shelf, went over to Madelon,
and laid a heavily tender hand on her shoulder.

"D'ye want any money to buy your wedding-fixings with?" he said, in a
half-whisper.

"I've got all I want," replied Madelon, wincing as if he had struck
her.

"Because I've sold some skins, lately, and wood." David plunged a
hand into his pocket, and began to pull out a leather pouch jingling
with coins.

"I've got all the money I want, father," said Madelon, catching her
breath a little, but keeping her face steady. Could her father have
understood, if she had told him, the pretty maiden providence, almost
like one of the primal instincts, which had led her to save, year
after year, little sums from her small earnings, towards her
wedding-outfit? Could he, with his powerful masculine grasp of the
large woes of life, have sensed this lesser one, and fairly known the
piteous struggle it cost Madelon to spend her poor little wealth,
which was to have furnished adornment for her bridal happiness with
her lover, for such a purpose as this? Had she turned upon him then
and there, and told him that she hated Lot Gordon, and would rather
lie down in her grave than be his wife, he might have grasped that
indeed, although not in her full sense of it, for the same sense of
misery of that kind comes not to a man and a woman; but the other he
would have puzzled over and solved it by his one sweeping solution of
all feminine problems--by femininity itself.

However, he continued to stand beside his daughter, l