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He felt that he had a duty of loyalty towards this desperate girl's father and brothers as well as to herself. He had promised Eugene Hautville to bring her home this morning, and who could tell where she might wander and when she might return if he left her now? He still did not look at Madelon as he spoke, but he felt her turn and fasten her eyes upon his face, and somehow they compelled his.
"I tell you I'm going," said Burr, with a thrust of his elbow in his cousin's side. "Well," said Lot, "go if you want to, or go if you don't want to. That last is what you're doing, Burr Gordon." "What do mean by that?" "You're going to see Dorothy Fair when you want to see Madelon Hautville, because you don't want to do what you want to. Well, go on. I'm going to see Madelon and hear her sing.
The new-fallen snow seemed to muffle silence itself, and do away with that wide susceptibility to sound which affects one as forcibly as the crashing of cannon. There was no whisper of life from the village, which lay a half-mile back; no roll of wheels, or shout, or peal of bell. Burr Gordon kept on in utter silence until he came near the Hautville house.
David Hautville settled into a chair with a surly grunt. He watched Lot cough, holding to his straining chest, and thought that he must be worse, else he would not have sent for the doctor. He resolved to wait and take his daughter home with him, by force if necessary, but with no more disturbance of this man, who might be sick unto death.
All the neighbors knew when Eugene Hautville left Parson Fair's house that afternoon, but their knowledge stopped there. Nobody ever discovered just what was said within those four walls when Dorothy who, soft plumaged though she was, had flown in the faces of all her decorous feminine antecedents and her goodly teaching confronted her father with her new lover at her side.
"I will tell you, Basil," said Marion Hautville; "what I call a great hero. The man who does his duty perfectly in the state of life in which God has placed him." "We all do that," replied Basil. "Indeed we do not you do not, to begin with.
The Hautvilles were said to have French and Indian blood yet, in strong measure, in their veins; it was certain that they had both, although it was fairly back in history since the first Hautville, who, report said, was of a noble French family, had espoused an Iroquois Indian girl.
Seeing Lot cast his eyes about as if looking for something, and make a motion towards the table at his side, he rose up quickly and got him a spoonful of the cough mixture in a bottle thereon, and administered it to him gently. "Don't you touch my wet coat," said David Hautville, "or yo'll get a chill," and he held himself carefully away from the sick man.
"How dare you," she cried out, "swear to that lie? Liar! You are a liar, Lot Gordon!" Then, before Lot could reply, David Hautville came forward with a mighty plunge, and grasped his daughter by the arm, and forced her to the door. "Get ye out of this," growled David Hautville; but Madelon turned her face back in the doorway for one last word.
But he may last a number of years yet folks in consumption do sometimes; and I hear he's gettin' over that cut he give himself. I suppose he did that because he thought you wouldn't have him." Madelon, moving about the table, did not say a word. "It must have been that," said David Hautville. "I suppose he thought you favored " he was about to speak Burr's name; then he stopped short.
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