She did not during the meal say another word concerning the tragedy in which she was living, but there was a strange silent vehemence and fire about her which seemed louder than speech.

Now and then her father and her brothers started and stared at her as if she had cried out.

Two red spots had come on her brown cheeks; her eyes were glittering with dark light; her lips were a firm red; her fingers stiffened with nervous clutches.

She looked as if every muscle in her were strained and rigid for a leap.
After dinner Eugene and Abner went out again with their guns, and David smoked his old pipe by the fire, while Madelon put away the dishes and swept the floor.

When her work was finished the pipe was smoked out, and David rose up slowly, clapped his fur cap over his white head, and took up his axe.
"Mind ye say what ye said this morning to nobody else," he said, as he went out the door.
"I'll say it with my dying breath," returned Madelon, and she caught her breath, as if it were indeed her last, as she spoke.
"Accuse yourself of murder, would ye, and be hung, and leave your own kith and kin with nobody to keep house for them, for the sake of a man that's left ye for another girl!" "Father, I tell you that _I_ did it!" But David clapped to the door on her speech, and the awful truth of it seemed to smite her in her own face.
Madelon went up-stairs, and brushed and braided her black hair before her glass; but the face therein did not look like her own to her, and she felt all the time as if she were braiding and wreathing the hair around another's head.