For the rest of the professor’s engagement Cap’n Aaron Sproul and Hiram Look kept sullenly to their castles, nursing indignant sense of their wrongs.  They got an occasional whiff of the scandal that was pursuing their names.  Though their respective wives strove with pathetic loyalty to disbelieve all that the seeress had hinted at, and moved in sad silence about their duties, it was plain that the seed of evil had been planted deep in their imaginations.  Poor human nature is only what it is, after all!

“Two better women never lived than them of ourn, and two that would be harder to turn,” said Hiram to the Cap’n, “but it wouldn’t be human nature if they didn’t wonder sometimes what we’d been up to all them years before we showed up here, and what that cussed occulter said has torched ’em on to thinkin’ mighty hard.  The only thing to do is to keep a stiff upper lip and wait till the clouds roll by.  They’ll come to their senses and be ashamed of themselves, give ’em time and rope enough.”

Second Selectman Batson Reeves busied himself as a sort of master of ceremonies for Professor Derolli, acted as committee of investigation when the professor’s “stock subject” remained for a day and night in a shallow trench in the village cemetery, and even gave them the best that his widower’s house could afford at a Sunday dinner.

In the early flush of an August morning about a week after the departure of the hypnotic marvel and his companions, a mutual impulse seemed to actuate Selectman Sproul and Hiram Look at a moment surprisingly simultaneous.  They started out their back doors, took the path leading over the hill between their farms, and met under the poplars at a point almost exactly half-way.  It would be difficult to state which face expressed the most of embarrassed concern as they stood silently gazing at each other.

“I was comin’ over to your house,” said Hiram.

“I was startin’ for yourn,” said the Cap’n.

Then both, like automatons pulled by the same string, dove hand into breast-pocket and pulled out a crumpled letter.

“Well, I’ll be dummed!” quoth the two in one voice.

“I don’t understand northin’ about it,” said Hiram, plaintively.  “But whatever it is, it has put me in a devil of a fix.”

“If you’re havin’ any more trouble to your house than I’m havin’ over to mine, then you’ve somethin’ that I don’t begrudge you none,” added the Cap’n, gloomily.

“Woman left it,” related Hiram.  “It was in the edge of the evenin’, and I hadn’t come in from the barn.  Woman throwed it onto the piazza and run.  Reckon she waited her chance so’t my wife would get holt of it.  She did.  She read it.  And it’s hell ‘n’ repeat on the Look premises.”

“Ditto and the same, word for word,” said the Cap’n.

“The handwritin’ ain’t much different,” said the ex-showman, clutching Sproul’s letter and comparing the two sheets.  “But it’s wimmen’s work with a pen—­there ain’t no gettin’ round that.”