t as well, Madelon," Lot answered, with sudden readiness and
sad dignity. "If you do not object to the change of time we had best
defer it."

Madelon looked away. "There is no need of any pretence between us,"
she said; "I am sorry you are not as well."

"But not sorry that our wedded bliss must be deferred?"

"No," said she. Then she went away, and that time Lot did not call
her back. She heard him coughing hard as she went through the entry.

When she came out of the house into the tumultuous darkness of the
spring night, and went down the road with the south wind smiting her
with broadsides of soft air, and the living sounds of water ahead and
on either hand of her, she was happy--in spite of Burr, in spite of
everything--with the happiness of one to whom is granted a respite
from death.

Chapter XX

When the mind has been strained up and held to the furthering of some
painful end and then suddenly released, it sinks back for a time,
alive to nothing but the consciousness of freedom and rest. Even the
thought for the future, which is its one weapon against fate, is laid
down. Madelon, for a few days after the postponement of her marriage,
went about in a kind of negative happiness. There are few who have so
much to bear that there is not left to them at least the joy of
escape from another trial. Madelon had lost her lover indeed, but she
was let loose for a while from a worse trouble than that.

When Madelon entered the house that Sunday night her face was so
changed that it held her father's and her brothers' casual glances.
Her cheeks were brilliant with the damp wind, her eyes gleaming, her
mouth half smiling as she looked around. For the first time for weeks
it seemed to Madelon that she had really come home, and the old
familiar place did not look strange to her with the threatening light
of her own future over it. She tossed off her hood and her red cloak,
and proposed with her old manner that they have some music.

The men looked at her and each other. "She's a woman," old David
muttered under his mustache, and got his viol.

Soon the grand chorus began, and Madelon sang and sang, with all her
old fervor. The brothers kept glancing at her, half uneasily, but
David wooed his viol as if it were his one love in the world, and
paid no attention to aught besides.

The concert lasted late that night. It was midnight before they
stopped singing and put their stringed instruments away.

Then Mad