lmost looked as if they pointedly refrained from coming
into the town. Had they heard about it? Why, of course. How should
they not have? When a community such as Doppersdorp fastens on to a
scandal of that magnitude, why, it worries it for all it is worth.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now, Charles Suffield, though an excellent fellow under the ordinary
circumstances of life, was not the man to stand by a friend at a pinch,
if the said pinch should chance to be of abnormal tightness. He was one
of those good, commonplace souls to whom a public scandal is a thing of
terror; wherefore it is not surprising that, when he came to learn that
the friend with whom he and his had been upon such intimate terms, had
stood his trial for murder of a peculiarly brutal and sordid nature,
narrowly escaping conviction, and that only on the cleverness and
eloquence of his counsel rather than on the merits of the case, it is
not surprising, we repeat, that he should have been, to use his own
definition, knocked end ways. He remembered that friend's studied
reticence, instances of which were continually cropping up, and how they
had all frequently laughed at and over such; now these all stood
accounted for. The whole thing was hideous, hideous beyond words; less
the actual murder than the motive--the pitiful, paltry robbery which had
prompted it. And to think that the man should have been mixing with
them all this while upon intimate terms. And Mona--oh, great Heavens!
what amount of mischief might not be done there?

Suffield's mind, being largely diluted with commonplace, floundered
about in a panic, landing its owner in rather a contemptible hole. For
in his horror of scandal, and disgust for the reputed crime, he was
quite ready to condemn his former friend right out of hand. His
reasoning was of the feminine order, "Everybody says so, therefore it
must be true." Curiously enough it was from a feminine mind that a
little wholesome common sense was brought to bear upon the question--the
mind of his wife, to wit.

"I won't believe it, even now," said Grace sturdily; perhaps with a
vivid recollection of that awful post-cart journey, the flooded river,
and the broken cord. "There may be some explanation, but anyhow it
seems rather unfair to put a man on his trial again after he has been
acquitted."

"Where there's smoke there must be fire," rejoined Suffield, with proud
origin