Burr Gordon might well have been quit of any charge of cowardice had he shrunk from facing the male Hautvilles on those days.  They passed him in the road with the looks of surly dogs in leash.  None of them except Eugene gave him a nod of recognition.  Eugene bowed always, with his unfailing grace of courtesy, but he hated him more than all the others, for he was jealous on his own account as well as his sister’s.  It was said that Burr Gordon, since his acquittal, was courting Dorothy Fair steadily, although they had not been seen out together.

Burr had been to the Hautville house twice since his return from New Salem, but had not been admitted.  Once when he called Madelon had been alone in the house, and caught a glimpse of her old lover coming into the yard.  She had sprung up, letting her needle-work slide to the floor, and fled with her face as white as death and her heart beating hard into the freezing best room, and stood back in a corner out of range of the windows, and listened to the taps of the knocker and finally to Burr’s retreating steps.  Then she crept across to a window and peered around the curtain, and watched him out of sight as if her soul would follow him; then she stole out the door and looked up and down to see if anybody was in sight; and then she flung herself down upon her knees and kissed her lover’s cold footprint in the snow.

The second time Burr came was on an evening, when her father and all her brothers except Richard were at the singing-school.  She knew Burr’s step when he drew near the door, and bade Richard shortly to answer the knock, and say she was busy and could see nobody, which he did with all the emphasis which his fiery young blood could put into words of dismissal.  The boy, of all the others, alone knew a reason why he should be more lenient with Burr; and yet this very reason seemed to swell his wrath and hold him more deeply responsible for a deeper disgrace.  When he had shut the door hard upon Burr, he turned to his sister.  “I would have killed him rather than let him in,” said he.

Madelon took another stitch in her work.  Her face looked as if it were carved in marble.  Richard stood staring at her a second; then he flung out of the room, and the doors closing behind him shook the house.  Richard’s manner towards his sister was sometimes full of a fierce sympathy and partisanship, sometimes of wild anger and aversion.  He looked ten years older in a few weeks.  Both he and Louis appeared to avoid the other members of the family, and kept much together, and yet even in their close companionship they also seemed to have a curious avoidance of each other; one was seldom seen to look in his brother’s face, or address him directly.

One morning, a month after Burr’s release, Margaret Bean came to the Hautville door.  She was well wrapped against the cold, her head especially being swathed about with lengths of knitted scarf over her silk hood; there was only a thin sharp gleam of face out of it, like a very lance of intelligence.  Margaret held out the stiff white corner of a letter from the folds of her shawl.  “He sent it,” she said to Madelon, who came to the door.