alert as a watch-dog. He could at an instant's warning leave that
delicate and dainty crew and those flowery shores, and intercept his
sister, should she attempt to pass him and escape from the house.

Still, his alertness all came to naught, for Madelon, like some
fleeing fox, took a sudden turn which no canny hunter could have
anticipated. She sat somewhat away from the hearth and well at
Eugene's back. He would have asked her why she did not draw nearer
the fire and if she were not cold had he not feared to encounter a
sulky humor. He could not see the lengths of linen cloth, which she
herself had spun and woven, lying in a great heap on the floor, half
at her back, half under her petticoats. However, could he have seen
it he would have thought of it merely as some mysterious domestic and
feminine proceeding about which he neither knew nor cared to know
anything.

Madelon, as she knitted, ever measured the distance between her
brother and herself with her great black eyes, training her nerves
and muscles for what she had to do as she would have trained a bow
and arrow.

Eugene turned a leaf in his Shakespeare book. Madelon made a leap, so
soft and swift that it seemed like an onslaught of Silence itself,
and he was smothered and wound about and entangled in folds of linen
as if it had been in truth his winding-sheet. He struggled as best he
might against his linen bands, and cried out as angrily as he could
for the linen that bound his mouth and his eyes, but he could not
release himself. Eugene was strong and lithe, but Madelon was nearly
as strong as he at any time; and now the great tension of her nerves
seemed to inform all her muscles with the strength of steel wire.