After Dorothy and Eugene were wedded they faded into comparative insignificance in the thoughts of the villagers, which were then centred upon Burr Gordon and Madelon.  The curtain went down upon Eugene and his bride as upon any pair of wedded lovers in his Shakespeare book.

Burr was in exceedingly ill repute, but he did not himself know it.  Many of his old friends treated him coolly, but he attributed that to the embarrassed sympathy and constraint which they naturally felt towards him in his position.  He thought they avoided him because they knew well that he would suspect even friendliness lest it contain a pity which would hurt his pride; and he thanked them for it.  But the truth was, that outcry of Dorothy’s against him on the wedding-night had lashed up into a hurricane all the suspicions which Lot’s avowal had stilled.  They did away easily enough with the force of Lot’s statement, for there are many theories to furnish skin-fits for every difficulty, if one searches in the infinity of possibilities.

Lot’s true reason none fathomed, for it was beyond their sounding-lines of selfish curiosity; but they found another which seemed to meet the needs of the case as well.

Lot, they said, had bargained with Burr to give up all claim to Madelon, and he would set him free by confessing an attempt at suicide.  Margaret Bean, it was reported, had seen the letter which Lot had written to Burr in prison.  When Madelon, who, half crazed by anxiety about her lover, had wrongfully accused herself to save him, had seen him turn to her rival and scorn her after his release, she had accepted Lot in a rage of pride and jealousy, as he had planned for her to do.  The breaking off of the marriage betwixt her and Lot they mostly attributed to the simple cause he had mentioned—­his failing health—­though some thought that he had hesitated about marrying into the Hautville family when it came to it.

Suspicion had been for a time somewhat hushed against Madelon, the more so that she had been seen, since Dorothy had jilted Burr, to pass him with scarcely a nod, and was popularly supposed to hold an Indian grudge against him, and to be still anxious to wed his cousin Lot.

However, the tide soon turned again.  On the Sunday after the banns between Dorothy and Eugene had been published, Burr had been seen to walk home openly with Madelon from evening meeting; and it was soon known that he was courting her regularly.

Then darker whispers were circulated.  People said now that they were accomplices in attempted crime.  That black atmosphere of suspicion and hatred, which gathers nowhere more easily than in a New England town, was thick around Burr and Madelon.  They breathed, though as yet it was in less degree, the same noxious air as did the persecuted Quakers and witches of bygone times.  The gases which lie at the bottom of human souls, which gossip and suspicious imaginations upstir, are deadlier than those at the bottoms of old wells.  Still Madelon and Burr knew nothing of it, nor Burr’s mother, nor Lot, nor any of the Hautville men.  The attitude of Madelon’s father and brothers towards herself and Burr had done much to strengthen suspicion.  High voices and strange remarks had been overheard by folk strolling casually, of a pleasant evening, past the Hautville house.