of Dorothy's against him on the wedding-night
had lashed up into a hurricane all the suspicions which Lot's avowal
had stilled. They did away easily enough with the force of Lot's
statement, for there are many theories to furnish skin-fits for every
difficulty, if one searches in the infinity of possibilities.

Lot's true reason none fathomed, for it was beyond their
sounding-lines of selfish curiosity; but they found another which
seemed to meet the needs of the case as well.

Lot, they said, had bargained with Burr to give up all claim to
Madelon, and he would set him free by confessing an attempt at
suicide. Margaret Bean, it was reported, had seen the letter which
Lot had written to Burr in prison. When Madelon, who, half crazed by
anxiety about her lover, had wrongfully accused herself to save him,
had seen him turn to her rival and scorn her after his release, she
had accepted Lot in a rage of pride and jealousy, as he had planned
for her to do. The breaking off of the marriage betwixt her and Lot
they mostly attributed to the simple cause he had mentioned--his
failing health--though some thought that he had hesitated about
marrying into the Hautville family when it came to it.

Suspicion had been for a time somewhat hushed against Madelon, the
more so that she had been seen, since Dorothy had jilted Burr, to
pass him with scarcely a nod, and was popularly supposed to hold an
Indian grudge against him, and to be still anxious to wed his cousin
Lot.

However, the tide soon turned again. On the Sunday after the banns
between Dorothy and Eugene had been published, Burr had been seen to
walk home openly with Madelon from evening meeting; and it was soon
known that he was courting her regularly.

Then darker whispers were circulated. People said now that they were
accomplices in attempted crime. That black atmosphere of suspicion
and hatred, which gathers nowhere more easily than in a New England
town, was thick around Burr and Madelon. They breathed, though as yet
it was in less degree, the same noxious air as did the persecuted
Quakers and witches of bygone times. The gases which lie at the
bottom of human souls, which gossip and suspicious imaginations
upstir, are deadlier than those at the bottoms of old wells. Still
Madelon and Burr knew nothing of it, nor Burr's mother, nor Lot, nor
any of the Hautville men. The attitude of Madelon's father and
brothers towards herself and Burr had done much to strengthen