"If that gal belonged to me I'd get her some stronger bits," said the
man who had been cleaning the bay horse when Madelon came for the
white.

"I believe she's lost her mind," said the tavern-keeper. "It's the
last time I'll ever let her have a horse, and I told her so." There
came a blast of northwest wind which buffeted them about their faces
and chests like an icy flail, and they scattered before it, some to
their duties in the stable, some into the warm tavern for a mug of
something hot to do away with the chill. It was too cold a day to
gossip in a doorway. It was not long past noon, but the cold had
seemed to strengthen as the sun rode higher. The wind blew from the
icy northwest more frequently in fiercer gusts. Madelon Hautville
sped along before it, her red cloak flying out like a flag, and took
no thought of it at all. She was, while still in the flesh and upon
the earth, so intensified in spirit that there existed for her
consciousness neither heat nor cold. She reached the old road, the
short-cut, stretched down through the stiff white woods to her own
home; she hastened along it a little way, then she stopped and faced
back and stood irresolute. The icy wind stiffened her face, but she
did not note it. She looked back at the road with its blue
snow-furrows stretching between the desolate woods, at the spires and
roofs of the village beyond. If one followed that road to the village
and took the first one upon the right, and travelled ten miles, one
would come to the town of Kingston.

Madelon began moving along on the road to the village, vaguely at
first, as if half in a dream, then with gathering purpose. Back she
went, in her tracks, straight to the village and the tavern stable,