Hapgood, who
straightened his face suddenly. He deigned not a word to him, but he
turned to his daughter with a stern air. "Whether it is one way, or
whether it is the other way," said he, "we go neither by staying
here. Come home."

"I won't go!"

David looked sharply at his daughter's face. Jonas Hapgood's doubt
was over him too. He wondered, with a great spasm of wrath, if she
could be accusing herself to shield this man who had played her
false.

He grasped her arm again. "Come," he said, "I'll have no more of
this," and Madelon went out with her father. Full of spirit as she
was, she had always been strangely docile with him. He had ruled all
his children with a firm hand from their youth up, and tuned their
wills to suit his ear as he did his viol strings.

"I'll have no foolery," he said to her, gruffly, when they were out
on the road. "I'll have no putting yourself in the wrong to save a
man that's given you the go-by. If ye be fooling me, ye can stop it
now if you're a daughter of mine." He shook his head fiercely at
her.

But Madelon answered him with a burst of wrath that equalled his own.
"I stabbed him because I took him for the man who jilted me a-trying
to kiss me, with Dorothy Fair's kiss on his lips. _Me!_" she cried;
and she raised her hand as if she would have struck again had Burr
Gordon and his false lips been there.

Her father looked at her gloomily, then strode on with his eyes on
the snowy ground. He was still in doubt. David Hautville had that
primitive order of mind which distrusts and holds in contempt that
which it cannot clearly comprehend, and he could not comprehend
womankind. His sons were to him as words of one syllable in straight
lines; his daughter was written in compound and involved sentences,
as her mother had been before her. Fond and proud of Madelon as he
was, and in spite of his stern anxiety, her word had not the weight
with him that one of his son's would have had. It was as if he had
visions of endless twistings and complexities which might give it the
lie, and rob it, at all events, of its direct force.

Indeed, Madelon strengthened this doubt by crying out passionately
all at once, as they went on: "Father, you must believe me! I tell
you I did it! I--don't let them hang him! Father!" All Madelon's
proud fierceness was gone for a moment. She looked up at her father,
choking with great sobs.

David smiled down at her convulsed face. "She's nothing but a woman