No sooner had he gone than the facetious man launched his saw-like voice again upon the company.  “He had private information on the subject, he had.”

“There’s one sure thing,” said a stout, consequential man; “he believes the whole thing, the Principal does.”

A commercial traveller who was acquainted with the place put in his remark.  “There isn’t a man in town that I wouldn’t have expected to see gulled sooner.”

To which a thin, religious man, who, before Trenholme entered, had leaned to the opinion that there were more things in the world than they could understand, now retorted that it was more likely that the last speaker was gulled himself.  Principal Trenholme, he asserted, wasn’t a man to put his faith in anything without proofs.

Chellaston was not a very gossiping place.  For the most part the people had too much to do, and were too intent upon their own business, to take much trouble to retail what they chanced to hear; but there are some things which, as the facetious man observed, the dead in their graves would gossip about if they could; and one of these themes, according to him, was that Principal Trenholme believed there had been something supernatural about the previous life of the old preacher.  The story went about, impressing more particularly the female portion of the community, but certainly not without influence upon the males also.  Portly men, who a week before would have thought themselves compromised by giving a serious thought to the narrative, now stood still in the street to get the chance of hearing the preacher, and felt that in doing so they were wrapped in all the respectability of the cloth of Trenholme’s coats, and standing firm on the letters of his Oxford degree and upon all the learning of the New College.

They did not believe the story themselves.  No, there was a screw loose somewhere; but Principal Trenholme had some definite knowledge of the matter.  The old man had been in a trance, a very long trance, to say the least of it, and had got up a changed creature.  Principal Trenholme was not prepared to scout the idea that he had been nearer to death than falls to the lot of most living men.

It will be seen that the common sense of the speakers shaped crude rumour to suit themselves.  Had they left it crude, it would have died.  It is upon the nice sense of the probable and possible in talkative men that mad rumour feeds.

As for Trenholme, he became more or less aware of the report that had gone out about his private knowledge of old Cameron, but it was less rather than more.  The scholastic life of the college was quite apart from the life of the village, and in the village those who talked most about Cameron were the least likely to talk to Trenholme on any subject.  His friends were not those who were concerned with the rumour; but even when he was taxed with it, the whole truth that he knew was no apparent contradiction.  He wrote to Alec, making further inquiries, but Alec had retreated again many miles from the post.  To be silent and ignore the matter seemed to be his only course.