He was convinced that his daughter's fair wits were shaken, and that nothing but summary dealing, as with a child, could avail anything.

When they reached home he bade her, with a kind of stern forbearance, to get into the house at once and see to her work there, and she obeyed again.
All that day, and many days after that, poor Madelon Hautville, who had been striving like any warrior against the powers and principalities of human wills and passions, and had grounded her arms after a victory which had left her wounded almost to death, carried her bleeding heart and walked her woman's treadmill.

She scoured faithfully the pewter dishes and the iron pots.

She swept the hearth clean and baked and brewed and spun and sewed.

Her lot would have been easier had her woe befallen her generations before, and she could, instead, have backed her heavy load of tenting through the snow on wild hunting-parties, and broken the ice on the river for fish, and perchance taken a hand at the defence when the males of her tribe were hard pressed.