“I have my own conception of it at least, and that I live up to.  ’Tis high time,” said Burr, with a kind of proud scorn of himself in his voice.

“Madelon Hautville—­loves—­you.”

“She does not, after all this.”

“She does!”

Burr stood straight and firm before his cousin, like a soldier.  “If she does,” said he, “and if she loved me with the love of ten lives instead of one, and I her, as perhaps I do, this last word of mine I will keep!” Then he went out with not another word, and presently returned with the deed of his little wooded property, which, however, his cousin Lot finally persuaded him to keep, as Margaret Bean gathered at the door, whither she had ventured again.

The loafers knew it all by nightfall, the news having been brought to the store by old Luke Basset, who had gotten it from Margaret Bean’s husband.  In a day or two they knew more from the same source.  Lot Gordon had engaged his cousin to improve the Gordon acres which had been lying fallow for the last ten years.  He had offered him a good salary.  He wanted to carry out some new-fangled schemes which he had got out of books.  Burr was going right to work; he had hired a man from New Salem to help him.

People began to think better of Lot Gordon than they had ever done, and they looked at Burr with more respect.  Many had considered that Dorothy Fair was not going to “do very well.”  “Guess if it wa’n’t for her father, and the chance of Lot’s dying, she’d have a pretty poor prospect,” they had said.  Now they agreed that “Maybe Burr Gordon won’t turn out so bad after all.  Maybe he’ll settle right down and go to work, and pay off his mortgage, when he gets married, and get a good living, even if Lot should hold out some time to come.”

They watched Burr as he swung up the street to Parson Fair’s in the spring twilights, with admiration for his stalwart grace, and growing approval for those inner qualities which outward beauty sometimes but poorly indicates.  They approved also of the temperate hours which he observed in his courting, for no one within eye-shot, or ear-shot, but knew when Parson Fair’s front door closed behind him.  Burr, during the last weeks before his marriage, never stayed much later than half-past nine or ten at his sweetheart’s house, and, in truth, was not sorely tempted to do so.  Mistress Dorothy in those days behaved in a manner which might well have aroused to rebellion a more ardent or a less determinately faithful lover.  She had the candles lit early in the beautiful spring twilights, and then she sat and stitched and stitched upon her wedding finery, bending her fair face, half concealed by drooping curls, assiduously over it, having never a hand at liberty for a lover’s caress, or an eye for his smiles.  Then, too, when Burr took leave, she stood before him with such a strange effect of terror and hauteur that he could do no more than touch her lips as if she had been a timid child,