“Why ain’t Lot Gordon goin’ to marry her?” they asked each other, and exchanged answering looks of dark suspicion.  The reason for not marrying which Lot used every means in his power to promulgate—­his fast-failing health—­gained little credence.  The story came directly from the doctor’s wife that Lot Gordon was no worse than he had been for the last ten years, and was likely to live ten years to come.  Margaret Bean was said to have told a neighboring woman, who told another, who in her turn told another, and so started an endless chain of good authority, that Lot Gordon had never coughed so little as he did this spring, and “ate like a pig.”  He was, it is true, never seen on the highway, but there were those who said he was abroad again in his old woodland haunts.

“Guess he didn’t change his mind about havin’ Mad’lon Hautville ’cause he was so much worse than common,” they said; “guess when the time drawed near he was afraid.”  Margaret Bean was, furthermore, on good authority reported to have intimated that never, if Madelon had come to that house while she was in it, would she and her husband have gone to bed without the scissors in the latch of their bedroom door.

Lot Gordon, who had forsworn himself to save Madelon, was now, by his last sacrifice for her, bidding fair to prove what her own assertions had failed to do—­her guilt.  He crept out secretly into cover of the woods, now and then, on a mild day; he could not deny himself that.  But otherwise he stayed close, and coughed hard when there were listening ears, and complained like any old woman of his increasing aches and pains.  Still his cunning availed little, although he did not dream of it.

He went not among the gossips himself, and no one as yet had ventured to approach him with the rumor that was fast gaining ground.

No one had ventured to broach the matter to the Hautville men, for obvious reasons.  “I wouldn’t vally your skin if that fellar overheard what you was sayin’ of when he come up the road, Joe Simpson,” one loafer drawled to another, when Eugene left the store that afternoon and had disappeared going the long way home.

“Hush up, will ye!” whispered the other, glancing around pale under his unshaven beard as if he feared Eugene might yet be there.  The Hautville men, however, hearing nothing, and saying nothing about the matter to each other, had always, among themselves, a subtle exchange of uneasy thought concerning it.  If one sat moodily by and moved out of her way without a word while Madelon prepared a meal, the others knew what it meant.  They also knew well the meaning of each other’s glances at her, and sudden lowering of brows.  Madelon herself did not know.  When she had come home that Sunday night, and announced that she was not going to be married at all, she had not understood the sharp questioning, and then the stern quiet that followed upon it.  She had told them simply that Lot said that his lungs were gone; that he had ascertained the fact himself through his own knowledge of medicine; that he could only live a wreck of a man, if at all, and, knowing it was so, had made up his mind that he would not marry.