Mrs. Otis, standing there on the door-step in the
freezing moonlight, turned quickly upon the man in
the sleigh, and all the soft conciliation was gone
from her voice. “You ain’t plannin’
to take that girl way home to Ware Centre to-night?”
said she.
“Father sent me for her,” replied Eugene
Hautville.
“Well, she ain’t goin’ a step!”
“Her father will expect me to bring her,”
said Eugene, with his unfailing courtesy. “He
has been very anxious. I had hard work to find
where she was. My father won’t be satisfied
if I come home without her.”
“That girl ain’t going out of this house
to-night!”
“I’ve got a bearskin here to wrap her
up in. She is used to being out in all weathers,”
persisted Eugene, gently.
“She can’t go. Pull her out of a
warm bed such a night as this! If you try to
take that poor child out to-night I’ll stand
in my spare-chamber door, and you’ll have to
walk over me to do it—and my son won’t
see his mother hurt, I guess!”
Jim Otis stepped closer to the sleigh and spoke to
Eugene Hautville in a low voice.
“Well,” said Eugene, slowly, “maybe
you’re right, Otis. I don’t know
what father will say, but if she was as used up as
you tell for, I don’t know as ’tis safe.
It is an awful night.”
“I guess it ain’t safe, and she ain’t
going,” maintained Mrs. Otis from the door-step.
Then Eugene Hautville bent well out of his sleigh
and asked a question in the other man’s ear.
“Yes, she did,” replied Jim Otis.
“The poor girl is crazy over it,” said
Eugene. He and Jim talked for a few moments,
but Mrs. Otis, straining her ears on the door-step,
could not hear.
Suddenly Jim said, quite distinctly, “She wanted
to know if I saw him give her the knife.”
There was a pause; then Eugene Hautville asked, in
a voice with which he might have addressed a judge
of his life and death, “Did you?”
“No,” said Jim Otis.
The next morning there took place in a few hours a
great change in the temperature. It moderated
rapidly. The frost on the windows and the ice-ridges
in the roads did not soften yet, since the sun was
overcast by heavy clouds, but the terrible rigor and
tension of the cold was relaxed, and men could breathe
without constraint. At eight o’clock, when
Jim Otis and Madelon started for Ware Centre, there
was a white film of fallen snow over the distant hills
and scattering flakes drove in advance of the storm.
A mile out of Kingston it snowed hard. “Hadn’t
you better have that extra shawl mother put in over
your shoulders?” Jim Otis suggested.
But Madelon shook her head. “The snow won’t
hurt me,” she said. She sat up straight
in the sleigh, and there was a look in her eyes, fixed
ahead on the white drive of the storm, as if her spirit
were out-speeding her body. She had her strength
again that morning. She had slept and eaten.
She had submitted to the exigencies of life that she
might gain power to resist them again.
