"I am so afraid--you don't know," she whispered, piteously. "But--you know Burr was cleared." "Yes, I know, but even now he will not tell me on the Bible, as I asked him, that he is innocent." "Dorothy, he _is_ innocent," Eugene said, with solemn and bitter emphasis of which she knew not the full meaning. "Then why does he not swear that he is, to me?" Back went Dorothy always, in all reasoning, to the starting-point in her own mind. "I tell you he is, child. It has been proven so." "Then why--" Dorothy began, but Eugene interrupted her in her circle. "There is no more cause for you to fear him than me," he said almost harshly, in his stern resolve to be just. Then Dorothy turned on him with sudden passion. "I am afraid," she cried out, "I shall always be afraid; even if he were to swear to me now that he is innocent, I shall always be afraid, for I coupled him with that awful deed once in my thoughts, and I cannot separate him from it forever. He will always hold the knife in his hand; even if it were not for you, I should be near mad with fear. I bid black Phyllis stay by the door when he comes." "Dorothy!" "Yes, I do. What my mind has once laid hold of, that it will not let go. I cannot separate him from my old thought of him. I have tried to be faithful, and true, but even had he sworn to me that he was innocent, the fear would have remained. Save me from him--oh, Eugene, save me!" But Eugene put her quite away from him, and looked at her almost sternly. His honor held the reins now in good earnest. The suspicion of Madelon, which he had never owned to himself, became a certainty. He defended his rival as strenuously as he would have defended himself, since it involved truth to himself. "I swear to you, Dorothy Fair," he said, "that Burr Gordon is innocent, and that your fear of him is groundless." Dorothy looked at him with dilated eyes. She said not a word, but her mind travelled its circle again. "It is so," said Eugene; "I know it." Still Dorothy looked at him. "All my heart is yours," Eugene went on, "but I would rather it broke, and yours too, before I counselled you to be false to a man for a reason like that." A flush came over Dorothy's face. She pulled her straw hat from her shoulders to her head, and tied the blue strings under her chin. She gathered up daintily a fold of her blue mottled skirt on either side. "Then I will marry Burr this day week," she said. "I will endeavor to be a good and true wife to him, and I pray you to forget if you can what has passed between us to-day." She said this as calmly and authoritatively as her father could have said it in the pulpit, and courtesied slightly, then went on down the lane and out into the open beyond, with a soft tilt of her blue skirts and as gently proud a carriage as when she walked into the meeting-house of a Sabbath.