I came up to him the first thing I knew he threw his arm around me
and kissed me, and--something seemed to leap up in me and I struck
with Richard's knife. And--then he fell down, and I looked and it was
not Burr--it was his cousin Lot. And--then Burr came, and we heard
whistling, and others were coming, and he made me run, and the others
came up and found him; and now they say he did it and not I. It was I
who stabbed Lot Gordon, Dorothy Fair!"

"It was Burr's knife, with his initials cut in the handle, that they
found," said Dorothy, with a kind of piteous doggedness. There was in
this fair little maiden the same power of adherence to a mental
attitude which her father had shown in his religious tenets. Wherever
the men and women of this family stood they were fixed beyond their
own capability of motion.

Madelon gave a bewildered sigh. "I know not how that was," said she,
"unless--" a red flush mounted over her whole face. "No, he would not
have done that for me," she said, as if to herself.

A red flush on Dorothy's face seemed to respond to that on Madelon's.
"You think he put his knife there to take suspicion from you?" she
cried out, quickly.

Madelon shook her head. "I don't know about the knife," she said,
"but I know I stabbed Lot Gordon."

"He would not have done that," said Dorothy, with troubled, angry
blue eyes on her face. "He would have thought of--others. He never
changed the knife, Madelon Hautville!"

"I know nothing about the knife," repeated Madelon, "but Burr Gordon
did not kill his cousin."

"He was there, and it was his knife," said Dorothy. There was now a
curious indignation in her manner. It was almost as if she preferred
to believe her lover guilty of murder rather than unduly solicitous
for her rival.

Madelon Hautville turned upon her with a kind of fierce solemnity.
"Dorothy Fair," said she, "look at me!" and the soft, blue-eyed face,
full of that gentle unyielding which is the firmest of all, looked up
at her from the pillows--"Dorothy Fair, did that man, who's locked up
over there in jail in New Salem, for a crime he's innocent of, ever
kiss you?"

Madelon's face seemed to wax stiff and white. She looked like one who
bared her breast for a mortal hurt as she spoke. Dorothy went pink to
the roots of her yellow hair and the frill on her nightgown. She made
an angry shamed motion of her head, which might have signified
anything.

"And you can believe this thing of him after th