ays be afraid, for I coupled him with that awful deed once
in my thoughts, and I cannot separate him from it forever. He will
always hold the knife in his hand; even if it were not for you, I
should be near mad with fear. I bid black Phyllis stay by the door
when he comes."

"Dorothy!"

"Yes, I do. What my mind has once laid hold of, that it will not let
go. I cannot separate him from my old thought of him. I have tried to
be faithful, and true, but even had he sworn to me that he was
innocent, the fear would have remained. Save me from him--oh, Eugene,
save me!"

But Eugene put her quite away from him, and looked at her almost
sternly. His honor held the reins now in good earnest. The suspicion
of Madelon, which he had never owned to himself, became a certainty.
He defended his rival as strenuously as he would have defended
himself, since it involved truth to himself. "I swear to you, Dorothy
Fair," he said, "that Burr Gordon is innocent, and that your fear of
him is groundless."

Dorothy looked at him with dilated eyes. She said not a word, but her
mind travelled its circle again.

"It is so," said Eugene; "I know it."

Still Dorothy looked at him.

"All my heart is yours," Eugene went on, "but I would rather it
broke, and yours too, before I counselled you to be false to a man
for a reason like that."

A flush came over Dorothy's face. She pulled her straw hat from her
shoulders to her head, and tied the blue strings under her chin. She
gathered up daintily a fold of her blue mottled skirt on either side.
"Then I will marry Burr this day week," she said. "I will endeavor to
be a good and true wife to him, and I pray you to forget if you can
what has passed between us to-day."

She said this as calmly and authoritatively as her father could have
said it in the pulpit, and courtesied slightly, then went on down the
lane and out into the open beyond, with a soft tilt of her blue
skirts and as gently proud a carriage as when she walked into the
meeting-house of a Sabbath.

Eugene said not a word to stop her, but stood staring after her. All
his study of his Shakespeare helped him not to an understanding of
this one girl, whom he saw with love-dimmed eyes. This sudden
abetting on her part of his resolve gave him a sense of earthquake
and revolution, yet he did not call her back or follow her.

He proceeded through the lane to the highway, then a few yards
farther to the store, to get his Boston weekly pape