ch her again!" Then she
turned to Dorothy. "Give me the silk," she said, in a hard voice. In
her heart she blamed her more than her brother, although
unnecessarily.

Dorothy shrank back. "No," she said, feebly, "I had better not."

"Give me the silk!"

Dorothy gave her the silk. Eugene stood apart. He possessed his fine
pride and graceful self-poise again, and though his blood boiled he
would not, being a man, wrestle with his sister for another man's
bride.

Dorothy moved towards the door, her fair curls drooping over her
agitated face. Eugene made a motion in her direction, and when
Madelon would have thrust him back again, he only said, with a
half-smile, "I would crave the lady's pardon; you would not prevent
that." And then he bowed low before Dorothy Fair, and besought her
to pardon, if she could, his unseemly conduct, and believe that it
had for motive only the highest respect and esteem for her.

And Dorothy swept her curls farther over her face, and could not make
the dignified response of offended maidenhood that she should, but
courtesied tremblingly and fairly fled out of the house.

Eugene, with his Shakespeare book under his arm, went also out of the
house and over across the field, to a piney wood he loved, where all
the trees, even in this warm flush of spring, whispered eternally of
winter and the north, and there he stretched himself out beneath a
tree, as melancholy as Jacques in the forest of Arden. Now that he
had got the better of his impulse of mad passion and jealousy, he was
ashamed, and stayed late in the wood, for he did not like to meet his
sister's rightly scornful face.

When he went at last late for his supper, Madelon, as he expected,
noticed him only by an angry flash of her black eyes, under drooping
lids. She said not one word to him, and as the days went on treated
him coldly; and yet she did not give to the matter its full
seriousness of meaning.

Madelon, well acquainted with Eugene's caressing manner, thought
simply that, seeing poor Dorothy's alarm, he had striven to soothe
her with endearments and assurance that he would not hurt her, as he
would have done with a child. As for Dorothy, Madelon credited her
with the soft spirit which she knew she possessed. She scorned them
both, and felt as jealous for Burr's sake as he himself could have
done, that other hands than his had touched his bride's; and yet she
did not dream of the full significance of it all.

She wrou