Margaret Bean's husband went back into the kitchen, and Margaret followed Madelon with a sly, determined air, to Lot's room.
The great square northwest room was warm, but the frost had not yet melted from the window-panes. The room looked full of hard white lines of frost, and starched curtains, and high wainscoting; but the hardest white lines of all were in Lot Gordon's face, sunken sharply in his pillows, showing between the stiff dimity slants of his bed-hangings as in a tent door. He looked already like a dead man, except for his eyes. It seemed as if the life in them could never die when they saw Madelon. She bent over him, darkening the light.
“Speak now!” said she.
Lot Gordon looked up at her.
“I tell you, speak! I will not bear this any longer. I am at the end.”
Still Lot Gordon looked up at her silently.
Then Madelon made a quick motion in the folds of her skirt, and there was the long gleam of a hunting-knife above the man in the bed. Margaret Bean, standing by the door, shrieked faintly, but she did not stir.
“I have tried everything,” said Madelon. “This is the last. Speak, or I will make your speaking of no avail. I will strike again, and this time they shall find me beside you and not Burr. My new guilt shall prove my old, and they will hang me and not him. Speak, or, before God, I will strike!”
Then Lot Gordon spoke. “I love you, Madelon,” said he.
“Say what I bid you, Lot Gordon; not that.”