y delay, for the thief, if he escaped, could make but
small speed in the drifting storm over roads which led to no near place
of escape or hiding.

It was the judge's daughter which Courthope now saw in Madge--the desire
to estimate evidence, the fearless judgment.

'We took you in last night, a stranger; and now we have been robbed,
which never happened before in all our lives. My sister says it was you
she saw in our room. As soon as I could get the candle lit I found you
here, and Jacques Morin says that you have opened your window so that
you would be able to escape at once. What is the use of saying that you
are not a robber?'

He made another defiant statement of his own version of the story.

The girl had given some command in French to Morin; to Courthope she
spoke again in hasty sentences, reiterating the evidence against him.
Her manner was a little different now--it had not the same
straightforward air of command. He began to hope that he might persuade
her, and then discovered suddenly that she had been deliberately
riveting his attention while the command which he had not understood was
being obeyed. A noose of rope was thrown round his arms and instantly
tightened; with a nimbleness which he had not expected Morin knotted it
fast. Courthope turned fiercely; for a moment he struggled with all his
force, bearing down upon Morin from his greater height, so that they
both staggered and reeled to the foot of the stair. At his violence the
voices of the Morin women, joined by that of Eliz, were lifted in such
wild terror that a few moments were sufficient to bring Courthope to
reason. He spoke to Madge with haughty composure.

'Tell him to untie this rope at once. There is some villain about the
house who may do you the greatest injury; you are mad to take from me
the power of arresting him.'

Madam Morin, seeing the prisoner secured, hastened with her lamp to his
bedroom.

Madge, feeling herself safer now, came a little way down the stair with
her candle. 'How can we tell what you would do next?' she asked. 'And I
have the household to protect; it is not for myself that I am afraid.'

The anger that he had felt toward her died out suddenly.

It was not for herself that she was afraid! She stood a few steps above
him; her little candle, flashing its rays into the darkness of the upper
and lower halls, made walls and balustrades seem vast by its flickering
impotence to oust the darkness. Surely this gir