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 paper.  The mail had come in.  On this warm spring day the loafers on the boxes and barrels within the store had crawled out to the bench on the piazza and sat there in a row.  All mental states have their illustrative lives of body.  This shabby row leaned and lopped and settled upon themselves, into all the lines and curves and downward slants of laziness, and with rank tobacco-smoke curling about them, like the very languid breath of it.  However, when Eugene Hautville drew near, there was a slight shuffling stir; a drawling hum of conversation ceased, and when he entered the store their eyes followed him, bright with furtive attention.  The mill of gossip had ground slowly in this heavy spring atmosphere, but it had ground steadily.  They had been discussing Madelon Hautville and the breaking off of her marriage with Lot Gordon.  It was village property by this time, and all tongues were exercised over it.