but the boy
Richard eyed her with furtive pity. That night he lingered behind the
others when they dispersed for the night, and went up to Madelon and
threw an arm around her, and laid his cheek against hers. "Oh,
Madelon, I wish--" he began, and then he caught his breath, and his
cheek against hers was wet, and Madelon turned and comforted him, as
a woman will turn and comfort a man for even his pity for her sorrow.

"There is no need for you to fret," she said, with a sort of gentle
authority, as if she had been his mother. "I've got my life to live,
and I've got strength enough to live it. I shall do well enough."

Then she put him away from her softly, and went about setting bread
to rise. But he followed beseechingly at her heels, with a little
parcel which he had been hiding in a corner of the dresser. "I bought
these for you, with some of my trap money, for a little present," the
boy whispered, piteously; and Madelon smiled at him and took the
parcel and opened it, and found therein a pair of fine red-satin
shoes. Then he brightened at the delight which she showed, and went
up-stairs to bed, feeling that after all it would be no such hard
task for his sister to marry Lot Gordon, and cover her fault of mad
temper and her disgrace. "He likes her so much he will treat her
kindly, and she will have a fine house, and plenty of silk gowns, and
feathers in her bonnets," reflected Richard, comfortably, with no
more consciousness of his sister's outlook upon life than if his eyes
were turned towards a scene in another world. Still he loved his
sister with all his heart, although he never in his life had seen
anything just as she saw it. He did not dream that Madelon's calm
broke before his red-satin shoes, and that she was sitting alone
before the kitchen fire with them in her lap, weeping bitterly. She
was made of stern stuff to endure the worst of things; but, after
all, the pitiful little accessories of grief and death are harder to
bear without weakening, because all one's powers of defence are not
enlisted against them. They are sometimes the scouts that kill.

Poor Madelon looked at her brother's wedding-gift, the little
red-satin shoes, in which she could never walk or dance with a merry
heart, and her courage almost failed her. But it was only for a
little while. She rose up and finished setting the bread to rise, and
then she went to her chamber and packed away the shoes with the other
things in the cedar ches