Madelon looked at the other woman a second with fierce questioning.  Then she sprang up out of the chair where she had been placed, and stood before her on her sofa, and cried out, abruptly, “I have come to tell you about your son.  He is not guilty.  I, myself, stabbed Lot Gordon!”

“Please be seated,” said Elvira Gordon, and her folded hands in her lap never stirred.

“Seated!” cried Madelon, “seated!  How can you be seated, how can you rest a moment—­you, his mother?  Why do you not set out to New Salem now—­now?  Why do you not walk there, every step, in the snow?  Why do you not crawl there on your hands and knees, if your feet fail you, and plead with him to confess that I speak the truth, and tell them to set him free?”

“I beg of you not to so agitate yourself,” said Elvira Gordon.  “You will be ill.  Pray be seated.”

Madelon bent towards her with a sudden motion, as if she would seize her by the shoulders.

“Are you his mother,” she cried—­“his mother—­and sit here, like this, and speak like this?  Why do you not move?  Why do you not start this instant for New Salem—­this instant?”

“I beg you to calm yourself,” replied Elvira Gordon.  “I have been to New Salem to visit my son.  I have prayed with him in his prison.”

“Prayed with him!  Don’t you know that he is innocent, and in prison for murder—­your own son?  You stop to pray with him; why don’t you act to save him?”

“You will make yourself ill, my dear.”

“Don’t you believe that your son is innocent?” demanded Madelon.  “Don’t you believe it?”

Her eyes blazed; she clinched her hands.  She felt as if she could spring at this other woman with her gentle murmurings and soft foldings, and shake her into her own meaning of life.  If her impulse had had the power of deed, Elvira Gordon’s little cap of fine needle-work would have been a fiercely crumpled rag upon her decorous head, her sober bands of gray hair would have streamed like the locks of a fury, the quiet clasp of her long fingers would have been stirred with some response of indignant defence if nothing else.  Madelon, with her, realized that worst balk in the world—­the balk of a passive nature in the path of an active one—­and all her fiery zeal seemed to flow back into herself and fairly madden her.

“I hope,” said Elvira Gordon, “that my son will be proved innocent and set free.”

“Proved innocent!  Don’t you know your own son is innocent?”

“I pray without ceasing that he may be acquitted of the crime for which he is imprisoned,” replied Elvira Gordon, over her folded hands.

Madelon looked at her.  “You are a good woman,” said she, with fierce scorn.  “You are a member of Parson Fair’s church, and you keep to the commandments and all the creed.  You are a good woman, and you believe in the eternal wrath of God and the guilt of your own son.  You believe in that, in spite of what I tell you.  But I tell you again that I, and not your son, am guilty, and I will save him yet!”