ts had come on her brown cheeks; her eyes were glittering with
dark light; her lips were a firm red; her fingers stiffened with
nervous clutches. She looked as if every muscle in her were strained
and rigid for a leap.

After dinner Eugene and Abner went out again with their guns, and
David smoked his old pipe by the fire, while Madelon put away the
dishes and swept the floor. When her work was finished the pipe was
smoked out, and David rose up slowly, clapped his fur cap over his
white head, and took up his axe.

"Mind ye say what ye said this morning to nobody else," he said, as
he went out the door.

"I'll say it with my dying breath," returned Madelon, and she caught
her breath, as if it were indeed her last, as she spoke.

"Accuse yourself of murder, would ye, and be hung, and leave your own
kith and kin with nobody to keep house for them, for the sake of a
man that's left ye for another girl!"

"Father, I tell you that _I_ did it!"

But David clapped to the door on her speech, and the awful truth of
it seemed to smite her in her own face.

Madelon went up-stairs, and brushed and braided her black hair before
her glass; but the face therein did not look like her own to her, and
she felt all the time as if she were braiding and wreathing the hair
around another's head. One of those deeds had she committed which
lead a man to see suddenly the stranger that abides always in his
flesh and in his own soul, and makes him realize that of all the
millions of earth there is not one that he knows not better than his
own self, nor whose face can look so strange to him in the light of
his own actions.

Madelon put her red cloak over her shoulders as she might have put it
on a lay-figure, and tied on her hood. Then she went down-stairs, out
of the house to the barn, and put the side-saddle on the roan mare.

Not another woman in the village, and scarcely a man except the
Hautville sons, would have dared to ride this roan, with the backward
roll of her vicious eyes and her wicked, flat-laid ears; but Madelon
Hautville could not be thrown.

The mare, when she was saddled, danced an iron-bound dance in the
barn bay, but Madelon bade her stand still, and she obeyed, her
nostrils quivering, the breath coming from them in a snort of smoke,
and every muscle under her roan hide vibrating.

Then Madelon placed her foot in the stirrup, and was in the saddle,
pulling the bit hard against the jaw, and the mare shot out of th