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. One of those deeds had she committed which
lead a man to see suddenly the stranger that abides always in his
flesh and in his own soul, and makes him realize that of all the
millions of earth there is not one that he knows not better than his
own self, nor whose face can look so strange to him in the light of
his own actions.

Madelon put her red cloak over her shoulders as she might have put it
on a lay-figure, and tied on her hood. Then she went down-stairs, out
of the house to the barn, and put the side-saddle on the roan mare.

Not another woman in the village, and scarcely a man except the
Hautville sons, would have dared to ride this roan, with the backward
roll of her vicious eyes and her wicked, flat-laid ears; but Madelon
Hautville could not be thrown.

The mare, when she was saddled, danced an iron-bound dance in the
barn bay, but Madelon bade her stand still, and she obeyed, her
nostrils quivering, the breath coming from them in a snort of smoke,
and every muscle under her roan hide vibrating.

Then Madelon placed her foot in the stirrup, and was in the saddle,
pulling the bit hard against the jaw, and the mare shot out of the
barn with a fierce lash-out of her heels and an upheaval of her gaunt
roan flanks that threatened to dash the girl's head against the
lintel of the door.

But Madelon knew with what she had to do, and she bent low in the