fence when the males of her
tribe were hard pressed. Civilization bowed cruelly this girl, who
felt in greater measure than the gently staid female descendants of
the Puritan stock around her the fire of savage or primitive
passions; but she now submitted to it with the taciturnity of one of
her ancestresses to the torture. Week after week she went about the
house, and neither spoke nor smiled. Burr Gordon was set free, fully
acquitted of the charge against him; Madelon's denial of Lot's false
confession had gone for nothing. Half the village considered her
hysterical and irresponsible, and Lot Gordon, it was agreed, was just
the man to lay violent hands upon his own life, steal and use his
cousin's knife, and keep mute to fasten the guilt upon him, as he had
confessed.

A week after Burr's release Louis and Richard Hautville came home.
They had been trapping on Green Mountain, they said, camping in the
little lodge they had built there. When they came in laden with stark
white rabbits and limp-necked birds, and one of them with a haunch of
venison on his back, Madelon faced them with sudden fierceness, as if
to speak. Then she turned away to her work, without a word of
greeting. The boy Richard stared at her with a quiver, as of coming
tears on his handsome face. He whispered to Eugene, when she went
into the pantry.

"Best let her alone," said Eugene. "She's been so ever since."

Not one of them knew of her promise to marry Lot Gordon, and Lot had
bound Margaret Bean over to secrecy. All the village was as yet
ignorant of that, but there was enough besides to afford a choice
bone of gossip to folk sunken in the monotony and isolation of a
Vermont country winter. The women put their heads together over it at
their quilting-bees, and the men in their lounging-places in the
store and tavern. This mystery, which endured as well as their
hard-packed snows, and kept their imaginations always upon the
stretch, was a great acquisition to them. Plenty of mental activity
was there in Ware Centre that winter, and the brains of many were
smartly at work upon some of those problems whose conditions, being
all unknown quantities of character and circumstance and fate, are
beyond all rules of solution.

Would Burr Gordon marry Dorothy Fair, or would he, after all, turn
again to his old love, who had shown such devotion to him that it had
almost turned her brain? Unless, indeed--for there is room in gossip
for all suspicion, an