the body into a lower room, and laid it there until its burial, while
Bella sat in her chamber above, silent and tearless, not understanding
yet what had befallen her, but through her stunned and dreary stupor
listening from habit for the footsteps which should have returned at
that hour--the footsteps which death had already silenced for ever.




CHAPTER III.


It is easy to imagine how, in so small a community as Cacouna, the news
of a frightful crime committed in their very midst, would spread from
mouth to mouth. How groups of listeners would gather in the streets,
round every man who had anything of the story to tell. How the country
people who had been in town when the murdered man was brought home,
hurried along the solitary roads with a kind of terror upon them, and
carried the news out to the villages and farms around. As to the
murderer, there was a strange confusion in the minds of many of the
townspeople. Doctor Morton's feud with Clarkson had been so well known
that, if there had been any signs of premeditation or design about the
crime, suspicion would have turned naturally upon him. But there was no
such appearance, nor the smallest reason to suppose that Clarkson had
been within half a mile of the spot that day. On the contrary, no
reasonable doubt could exist that the real murderer was the Indian who
had been found among the bushes. The men who knew him spoke of him as
passionate, brutal, more than half-savage--there was perfect fitness
between his appearance and character, and the barbarous manner of his
crime. And yet while everybody spoke of him as undoubtedly guilty,