er the south window, his eyes peering
over the sill, his forehead wet with a snow-wreath, stifling back his
cough. When at last the candlelight went out in the great kitchen he
crept stiffly and wearily through the snow.

Chapter II

Lot Gordon lived about half a mile away in the old Gordon homestead
alone, except for an old servant-woman and her husband, who managed
his house for him and took care of the farm. Lot himself did not work
in the common acceptance of the term. His father had left him quite a
property, and he did not need to toil for his bread. People called
him lazy. He owned nearly as many books as the parson and the lawyer.
He often read all night it was said, and he roamed the woods in all
seasons. Under low-hanging winter boughs and summer arches did Lot
Gordon pry and slink and lie in wait, his fine, sharp face peering
through snowy tunnels or white spring thickets like a white fox,
hungrily intent upon the secrets of nature.

There was a deep mystery in this to the village people. They could
not fathom the reason for a man's haunting wild places like a wild
animal unless he hunted and trapped like the Hautville sons. They
were suspicious of dark motives, upon which they exercised their
imaginations.

Lot Gordon's talk, moreover, was an enigma to them. He was no
favorite, and only his goodly property tempered his ill repute.
People could not help identifying him, in a measure, with his noble
old house, with the stately pillared portico, with his silver-plate
and damask and mahogany, which his great-grandfather had brought from
the old country, with his fine fields and his money in the bank. He
held, moreover, a large mortgage on the house opposite, where Burr
Gordon lived with his mother. Burr's father and Lot's, although sons
of one shrewd father, had been of very different financial abilities.
Lot's father kept his property intact, never wasting, but adding from
others' waste. Burr's plunged into speculation, built a new house,
for which he could not pay, married a wife who was not thrifty, and
when his father died had anticipated the larger portion of his
birthright. So Lot's father succeeded to nearly all the family
estates, and in time absorbed the rest. Lot, at his father's death,
had inherited the mortgage upon the estate of Burr and his mother.
Burr's father had died some time before. Lot was rumored to be
harder, in the matter of exacting heavy interest, than his father had
been.