a goodly property to the simple needs of the day, appealed to his reason as well as his heart.  He remained until near midnight, while the old black woman crouched with the patience of a watching animal outside the door, and he wooed Dorothy Fair with ardor and delight, although her softly affectionate kisses were to Madelon Hautville’s as the fall of snow-flakes to drops of warm honey.  And although after he had gone home and fallen asleep his dreams were mixed, still when he waked with the image of Madelon between himself and Dorothy, because sleep had set his heart free, it was still with that sense of approbation.

Madelon Hautville was not considered a fair match for a young man who had claims to ambition.  The Hautville family held a peculiar place in public estimation.  They belonged not to any defined stratum of the village society, but formed rather a side ledge, a cropping, of quite another kind, at which people looked askance.  One reason undoubtedly was the mixture of foreign blood which their name denoted.  Anything of alien race was looked upon with a mixture of fear and aversion in this village of people whose blood had flowed in one course for generations.  The Hautvilles were said to have French and Indian blood yet, in strong measure, in their veins; it was certain that they had both, although it was fairly back in history since the first Hautville, who, report said, was of a noble French family, had espoused an Iroquois Indian girl.  The sturdy males of the family had handed down the name and the characteristics of the races through years of intermarriage with the English settlers.  All the Hautvilles—­the father, the four sons, and the daughter—­were tall and dark, and straight as arrows, and they all had wondrous grace of manner, which abashed and half offended, while it charmed, the stiff village people.  Not a young man in the village, no matter how finely attired in city-made clothing, had the courtly air of these Hautville sons, in their rude, half-woodland garb; not a girl, not even Dorothy Fair, could wear a gown of brocade with the grace, inherited from a far-away French grandmother, with which Madelon Hautville wore indigo cotton.

Moreover, the whole family was as musical as a band of troubadours, and while that brought them into constant requisition and gave them an importance in the town, it yet caused them to be held with a certain cheapness.  Music as an end of existence and means of livelihood was lightly estimated by the followers of the learned professions, the wielders of weighty doctrines and drugs, and also by the tillers of the stern New England soil.  The Hautvilles, furnishing the music in church, and for dances and funerals, were regarded much in the light of mountebanks, and jugglers with sweet sounds.  People wondered that Lot and Burr Gordon should go to their house so much.  Not a week all winter but Burr had been there once or twice, and Lot had been there nearly every night when his