e promised," she
said. "All this is useless. Let me go, Lot."

"Madelon!"

She looked up in his face, and a strange awe came over her at the
look in it. A more secret lurking-place than any of the little wild
things that he loved to discover had the self in Lot Gordon, and
Madelon saw it for the first time, and perhaps he, also.

"True love exists not unless it can do away with the desire of
possession. I love you, Madelon," said Lot; and then he let go of her
shoulders and went over to the mantel-shelf, and leaned against it,
with his head bent.

Madelon, all bewildered and trembling, stared at him.

"I--don't think I know what you mean," she gasped out, finally.

"You are--free," said Lot.

Chapter XXII

That year, spring seemed to break over the village in a day, like a
green flood. All at once people's thoughts were interrupted, and
their eyes turned from selfish joys or pains by the emerald flash of
fields and hill-sides in the morning sun, and the white flutter of
flowering boughs past their windows like the festal garments of
unexpected guests.

The first week in May, the cherry-trees were in blossom, and the
alders and shad bushes were white in the borders of the woods against
the filmy green of the birches. The young women got out their summer
muslins, and trimmed their bonnets anew; their faces, all unknown to
themselves, took on a new meaning of the spring, like new flowers,
and the young men looked after them as they passed as if they were
strangers in the village.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, in the first week of May, Eugene
Hautville strolled across-lots over to the village. Through the
fields north of the Hautville place there was an old foot-path to the
former site of an old homestead, long ago burned to the ground and
its ashes dissipated on winds long died away. The oldest inhabitants
in the village barely remembered the house that used to stand there.
The slant of its roof crossed their minds dimly when they spoke of
it: they could not agree as to whether it had faced north or south.
It might have seemed almost fabulous, had it not been for the thicket
of old lilacs purpling with bloom every spring, which had first grown
before its windows, and the perennial houseleek which had clustered
round the door.

Then, too, east of where the house had stood there was an old apple
orchard, the trees thereof bent to the ground like distorted old men,
and, when spring came, bearing scar