“No, father,” she replied, “I am not crazy. Let me go.”
She broke away from him and was out of the barn door, but suddenly she turned and came running back. The sudden softness in his voice had stirred the woman in her to weakness. She went close to her father, and threw up her arms around his great neck, and clung to him, and sobbed as if she would sob her soul away, and pleaded with him as for her life.
“Father!” she cried—“father, help me! Believe me! Tell them I did it! Tell them it is true! Don't let them hang Burr. Help me to save him, father! Don't let them! Save him! Oh, you will save him, father? You will? Tell me, father—tell me, tell me!” Madelon's voice rose into a wild shriek.
A sudden conviction of his solution of the matter and of his own astuteness came over David Hautville's primitive masculine intelligence. His daughter was wellnigh distraught with her lover's faithlessness and his awful crime and danger. She was to be watched and guarded lest she make a further spectacle of herself; but treated softly as might be, for she was naught but a woman, and liable to mischievous ailments of nerve and brain. David pressed his daughter's dark head with his hard, tender hand against his shoulder, then forced her gently away from him.
“It'll be all right,” said he, soothingly—“it'll be all right. Don't you worry.”
“Father, you will?”
“I'll fix it all right. Don't you worry.”
“Father, you promise?”
“I'll do everything I can. Don't you worry, Madelon. You'd better go in and get supper now. I'll go along to the house with you and get the lantern. It's getting too dark to do the work here.”
David drew his daughter along, out of the barn, across the snowy yard to the house, she pleading frantically all the way, he soothing her with his sudden wisdom of assent and evasion.