her, whether she walked or sat, and she moved with sinuous
wavings of her widow-bombazine.

The room into which she ushered Madelon was accounted the grandest
sitting-room in the village. When Burr's father had built his fine
new house he had made the furnishings correspond. He had eschewed the
spindle-legged tables and fiddle-backed chairs of the former
generations, and taken to solid masses of red mahogany, which were
impressive to the village folk. The carpet was a tapestry of great
crimson roses with the like of which no other floor in town was
covered, and, moreover, there was a glossy black stove instead of a
hearth fire.

"Please be seated," said Mrs. Gordon. She indicated the best chair in
the room. When her guest had taken it, she sat down herself in the
middle of her great haircloth sofa, and folded her long hands in her
lap. Mrs. Gordon had the extremest manners of the old New England
gentlewoman--so punctiliously polite that they called attention to
themselves. She had married late in life, having been previously a
preceptress in a young ladies' school. She was still the example of
her own precepts--all outward decorum if not inward composure.

Madelon Hautville, opposite her, in her snow-powdered cloak, with her
face like a flash of white fire in her snow-powdered silk hood,
seemed in comparison a female of another and an older race. She might
well, from the look of her, have come a nearer and straighter road
from the inmost heart of things, from the unpruned tangle of woods
and undammed course of streams, from all primitive and untempered
love and passion and religion, than this gentlewoman formed upon the
models of creeds and scholars.

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