"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!" Madelon Hautville gathered her red cloak about her, and Mrs. Gordon arose as she would have done when any caller was about to take leave. It would scarcely have seemed out of keeping with her manner had she politely invited Madelon to call again. However, her quiet voice was somewhat unsteady and hoarse when she spoke to Madelon on the threshold of the outer door, although the words were still gently formal. "I am grateful to you for the interest you take in my son," she said; "I hope you will not excite yourself so much that you will be ill." "I will die if that can save him," answered Madelon Hautville, and went down the snowy steps over the terraces. Elvira Gordon, when she had closed the door, drew the bolt softly. Truth was, she thought the girl had gone mad through grief and love for her son. Believing, as she did, that the love was all unsought and unreturned, and being also shocked in all her delicate decorum by such unmaidenly violence and self-betrayal, she regarded Madelon with a strange mixture of scorn and sympathy and fear.