"I've got all the money I want, father," said Madelon, catching her breath a little, but keeping her face steady. Could her father have understood, if she had told him, the pretty maiden providence, almost like one of the primal instincts, which had led her to save, year after year, little sums from her small earnings, towards her wedding-outfit? Could he, with his powerful masculine grasp of the large woes of life, have sensed this lesser one, and fairly known the piteous struggle it cost Madelon to spend her poor little wealth, which was to have furnished adornment for her bridal happiness with her lover, for such a purpose as this? Had she turned upon him then and there, and told him that she hated Lot Gordon, and would rather lie down in her grave than be his wife, he might have grasped that indeed, although not in her full sense of it, for the same sense of misery of that kind comes not to a man and a woman; but the other he would have puzzled over and solved it by his one sweeping solution of all feminine problems--by femininity itself. However, he continued to stand beside his daughter, looking at her across that great gulf of original conceptions of things which love itself can never quite bridge. Tears came into his keen black eyes, and his voice was hoarse when he spoke again. "Well, Madelon," said David Hautville, with a firmer laying on of his heavy hand on his daughter's shoulder, "ye've been a good daughter and sister, and we're all of us glad you've got over this last foolishness, and we don't lay it up against ye, and--we'll all miss ye when ye're gone." Madelon moved quietly away from her father's roughly tender hand. "I thought maybe the Widow Scoville would be willing to come here and live," said she. "She's a good cook and a good housekeeper. I'm going to see her about it." "Well, we'll see," said David Hautville, huskily--"we'll see." He turned away, and looked irresolutely at the shelf whereon his pipe lay, at the wedding-silk on the chair, at his great boots in the corner at the outer door, then at his bass-viol leaning in the corner which the dresser formed against the wall, and a light of decision flashed into his eyes.