"_Eugene!_" cried Madelon, and her voice seemed to carry wrath like a trumpet. She laid hold of his shoulders, and forced him back, and Dorothy slipped out of his arms and stood aside, trembling and weeping, with a little worked apron which she wore thrown over her face. "Let me be!" Eugene cried, angrily, and would have gone to Dorothy again to comfort her, but Madelon in her wrath was as strong as he, and she thrust herself between them. "You are no brother of mine, Eugene Hautville," she said, her face all white and fierce with anger. "You dare to touch her again, and you will find out that I can fight to keep her from you as well as Burr could if he were here. You _dare_ to touch her again!" Then she turned to Dorothy. "Give me the silk," she said, in a hard voice. In her heart she blamed her more than her brother, although unnecessarily. Dorothy shrank back. "No," she said, feebly, "I had better not." "Give me the silk!" Dorothy gave her the silk. Eugene stood apart. He possessed his fine pride and graceful self-poise again, and though his blood boiled he would not, being a man, wrestle with his sister for another man's bride. Dorothy moved towards the door, her fair curls drooping over her agitated face. Eugene made a motion in her direction, and when Madelon would have thrust him back again, he only said, with a half-smile, "I would crave the lady's pardon; you would not prevent that." And then he bowed low before Dorothy Fair, and besought her to pardon, if she could, his unseemly conduct, and believe that it had for motive only the highest respect and esteem for her. And Dorothy swept her curls farther over her face, and could not make the dignified response of offended maidenhood that she should, but courtesied tremblingly and fairly fled out of the house. Eugene, with his Shakespeare book under his arm, went also out of the house and over across the field, to a piney wood he loved, where all the trees, even in this warm flush of spring, whispered eternally of winter and the north, and there he stretched himself out beneath a tree, as melancholy as Jacques in the forest of Arden. Now that he had got the better of his impulse of mad passion and jealousy, he was ashamed, and stayed late in the wood, for he did not like to meet his sister's rightly scornful face. When he went at last late for his supper, Madelon, as he expected, noticed him only by an angry flash of her black eyes, under drooping lids. She said not one word to him, and as the days went on treated him coldly; and yet she did not give to the matter its full seriousness of meaning.