"I 'spose you all thought I wor lost. I ha' strange news for you, Dorothy."
"Bad or good?" asked Dolly, in a voice scarcely above her breath.
"Bad enough. This be what I heard in the market. That you, Dorothy Chance, had played the fule wi' Gilbert Rushmere. That the old folk turned you off for your bad conduct. That Gilly run'd away, to get rid on ye, an' went an' listed for a soger, an' be gone to forin parts. An' the old woman be quite crazed, an' well nigh dead wi' grief, an' has not been out o' bed for a fortnite. That Rushmere goes cursing and swearing about the house, an' wishing you in the bad place, an' that he had never seen your black face. That's the news I heard, and for sartin it be bad enough an' no mistake."
Dorothy's colour went and came as she clung to the gate for support. "You cannot believe that of me, Mrs. Letty. You cannot have the heart to believe it," she gasped out, in a tone of entreaty, appealing to the heart and conscience of her accuser. "It is false! cruelly false! I never did aught amiss with Gilbert in my life."
"Folks say it's true, at any rate," retorted the little souled creature, with a malignant glance of triumph at her pale trembling victim. "I tould you I never did 'blieve that cock an' bull story wi' which you gulled mother an' Joe. It didn't sound probable like—it didn't."
Joe's wife rode slowly up the avenue, to communicate what she had heard to the assembled household, leaving Dorothy at the gate crying as if her heart would burst.
The cruel and unjustifiable conduct of her lover, the distress of his parents, and her own desolation, was almost more than she could bear; and when to all this suffering was added the abominable slander just uttered by her unfeeling mistress, the weight of undeserved injury that pressed upon her brain was maddening. It changed all the benevolence of her nature into wrathful bitterness and unmitigated contempt.
A word had never before been breathed against her character. She had always been spoken of as a modest good girl, and pointed out as a model for imitation to all the young women in the parish,—and the base calumny just spoken by Letty Barford, and her evident satisfaction in repeating it, filled her with more grief, than even the sad news of Gilbert's enlistment.
"What shall I do!" she cried. "I cannot stay here. I cannot hold up my head among these people with all this shame cast upon me."
In a few minutes her resolution was taken. "I will go home," she sobbed, "and hear the truth from their own lips,—they must need help in their present distress. Who can feel for them like me, whose heart is bleeding from the same wound. Mother knows my innocence—she will pay no heed to these wicked stories. Yes, I will return to her this very night."