The Landlord At Lions Head, V1 ......................................................................................................................1

William Dean Howells .............................................................................................................................1

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In those dim recesses of the consciousness where things have their beginning, if ever things have a beginning,

I suppose the origin of this novel may be traced to a fact of a fortnight's sojourn on the western shore of lake

Champlain in the summer of 1891. Across the water in the State of Vermont I had constantly before my eyes

a majestic mountain form which the earlier French pioneers had named "Le Lion Couchant," but which their

plainerminded Yankee successors preferred to call "The Camel's Hump." It really looked like a sleeping

lion; the head was especially definite; and when, in the course of some ten years, I found the scheme for a

story about a summer hotel which I had long meant to write, this image suggested the name of 'The Landlord

at Lion's Head.' I gave the title to my unwritten novel at once and never wished to change it, but rejoiced in

the certainty that, whatever the novel turned out to be, the title could not be better.

I began to write the story four years later, when we were settled for the winter in our flat on Central Park, and

as I was a year in doing it, with other things, I must have taken the unfinished manuscript to and from

Magnolia, Massachusetts, and Long Beach, Long Island, where I spent the following summer. It was first

serialized in Harper's Weekly and in the London Illustrated News, as well as in an Australian newspaperI

I remember concerning it a very becoming despair when, at a certain moment in it, I began to wonder what I

was driving at. I have always had such moments in my work, and if I cannot fitly boast of them, I can at least

own to them in freedom from the pride that goes before a fall. My only resource at such times was to keep

working; keep beating harder and harder at the wall which seemed to close me in, till at last I broke through

into the daylight beyond. In this case, I had really such a very good grip of my characters that I need not have

had the usual fear of their failure to work out their destiny. But even when the thing was done and I carried

the completed manuscript to my dear old friend, the late Henry Loomis Nelson, then editor of the Weekly, it

was in more fear of his judgment than I cared to show. As often happened with my manuscript in such

exigencies, it seemed to go all to a handful of shrivelled leaves. When we met again and he accepted it for the

Weekly, with a handclasp of hearty welcome, I could scarcely gasp out my unfeigned relief. We had talked

the scheme of it over together; he had liked the notion, and he easily made me believe, after my first dismay,

I myself liked the hero of the tale more than I have liked worthier men, perhaps because I thought I had

achieved in him a true rustic New England type in contact with urban life under entirely modern conditions.

What seemed to me my esthetic success in him possibly softened me to his ethical shortcomings; but I do not

expect others to share my weakness for Jeff Durgin, whose strong, rough surname had been waiting for his

personality ever since I had got it off the side of an icecart many years before.

At the time the story was imagined Harvard had been for four years much in the direct knowledge of the

author, and I pleased myself in realizing the hero's experience there from even more intimacy with the

university moods and manners than had supported me in the studies of an earlier fiction dealing with them. I

had not lived twelve years in Cambridge without acquaintance such as even an elder man must make with the

undergraduate life; but it is only from its own level that this can be truly learned, and I have always been

ready to stand corrected by undergraduate experience. Still, I have my belief that as a jaythe word may

now be obsoleteJeff Durgin is not altogether out of drawing; though this is, of course, the phase of his

character which is one of the least important. What I most prize in him, if I may go to the bottom of the

inkhorn, is the realization of that antiPuritan quality which was always vexing the heart of Puritanism, and

which I had constantly felt one of the most interesting facts in my observation of New England.

As for the sort of summer hotel portrayed in these pages, it was materialized from an acquaintance with

summer hotels extending over quarter of a century, and scarcely to be surpassed if paralleled. I had a passion

for knowing about them and understanding their operation which I indulged at every opportunity, and which I

remember was satisfied as to every reasonable detail at one of the pleasantest seaside hostelries by one of the

most intelligent and obliging of landlords. Yet, hotels for hotels, I was interested in those of the hills rather

I worked steadily if not rapidly at the story. Often I went back over it, and tore it to pieces and put it together

again. It made me feel at times as if I should never learn my trade, but so did every novel I have written;

every novel, in fact, has been a new trade. In, the case of this one the publishers were hurrying me in the

revision for copy to give the illustrator, who was hurrying his pictures for the English and Australian

If you looked at the mountain from the west, the line of the summit was wandering and uncertain, like that of

most mountaintops; but, seen from the east, the mass of granite showing above the dense forests of the

lower slopes had the form of a sleeping lion. The flanks and haunches were vaguely distinguished from the

mass; but the mighty head, resting with its tossed mane upon the vast paws stretched before it, was boldly

sculptured against the sky. The likeness could not have been more perfect, when you had it in profile, if it had

been a definite intention of art; and you could travel far north and far south before the illusion vanished. In

winter the head was blotted by the snows; and sometimes the vagrant clouds caught upon it and deformed it,

or hid it, at other seasons; but commonly, after the last snow went in the spring until the first snow came in

the fall, the Lion's Head was a part of the landscape, as imperative and importunate as the Great Stone Face

Long after other parts of the hill country were opened to summer sojourn, the region of Lion's Head remained

almost primitively solitary and savage. A stony mountain road followed the bed of the torrent that brawled

through the valley at its base, and at a certain point a still rougher lane climbed from the road along the side

of the opposite height to a lonely farmhouse pushed back on a narrow shelf of land, with a meagre acreage

of field and pasture broken out of the woods that clothed all the neighboring steeps. The farmhouse level

commanded the best view of Lion's Head, and the visitors always mounted to it, whether they came on foot,

or arrived on buckboards or in buggies, or drove up in the Concord stages from the farther and nearer hotels.

The drivers of the coaches rested their horses there, and watered them from the spring that dripped into the

green log at the barn; the passengers scattered about the dooryard to look at the Lion's Head, to wonder at it

and mock at it, according to their several makes and moods. They could scarcely have felt that they ever had

a welcome from the stalwart, handsome woman who sold them milk, if they wanted it, and small cakes of

maple sugar if they were very strenuous for something else. The ladies were not able to make much of her

from the first; but some of them asked her if it were not rather lonely there, and she said that when you heard

the catamounts scream at night, and the bears growl in the spring, it did seem lonesome. When one of them

declared that if she should hear a catamount scream or a bear growl she should die, the woman answered,

Well, she presumed we must all die some time. But the ladies were not sure of a covert slant in her words, for

they were spoken with the same look she wore when she told them that the milk was five cents a glass, and

the black maple sugar three cents a cake. She did not change when she owned upon their urgence that the

gaunt man whom they glimpsed around the corners of the house was her husband, and the three lank boys

with him were her sons; that the children whose faces watched them through the writhing window panes were

her two little girls; that the urchin who stood shyly twisted, all but his white head and sunburned face, into

her dress and glanced at them with a mocking blue eye, was her youngest, and that he was three years old.

With like coldness of voice and face, she assented to their conjecture that the space walled off in the farther

corner of the orchard was the family burial ground; and she said, with no more feeling that the ladies could

see than she had shown concerning the other facts, that the graves they saw were those of her husband's

family and of the children she had lost there had been ten children, and she had lost four. She did not visibly

shrink from the pursuit of the sympathy which expressed itself in curiosity as to the sickness they had died of;

the ladies left her with the belief that they had met a character, and she remained with the conviction, briefly

The summer folks came more and more, every year, with little variance in the impression on either side.

When they told her that her maple sugar would sell better if the cake had an image of Lion's Head stamped on

it, she answered that she got enough of Lion's Head without wanting to see it on all the sugar she made. But

the next year the cakes bore a rude effigy of Lion's Head, and she said that one of her boys had cut the stamp

out with his knife; she now charged five cents a cake for the sugar, but her manner remained the same. It did

not change when the excursionists drove away, and the deep silence native to the place fell after their chatter.

When a cock crew, or a cow lowed, or a horse neighed, or one of the boys shouted to the cattle, an echo

retorted from the granite base of Lion's Head, and then she had all the noise she wanted, or, at any rate, all the

noise there was most of the time. Now and then a wagon passed on the stony road by the brook in the valley,

and sent up its clatter to the farmhouse on its high shelf, but there was scarcely another break from the

The continuous clash and rush of the brook was like a part of the silence, as the red of the farmhouse and

the barn was like a part of the green of the fields and woods all round them: the blackgreen of pines and

spruces, the yellowgreen of maples and birches, dense to the tops of the dreary hills, and breaking like a

bated sea around the Lion's Head. The farmer stooped at his work, with a thin, inwardcurving chest, but his

wife stood straight at hers; and she had a massive beauty of figure and a heavily moulded regularity of feature

that impressed such as had eyes to see her grandeur among the summer folks. She was forty when they began

to come, and an ashen gray was creeping over the reddish heaps of her hair, like the pallor that overlies the

crimson of the autumnal oak. She showed her age earlier than most fair people, but since her marriage at

eighteen she had lived long in the deaths of the children she had lost. They were born with the taint of their

father's family, and they withered from their cradles. The youngest boy alone; of all her brood, seemed to

have inherited her health and strength. The rest as they grew up began to cough, as she had heard her

husband's brothers and sisters cough, and then she waited in hapless patience the fulfilment of their doom.

The two little girls whose faces the ladies of the first coachingparty saw at the farmhouse windows had

died away from them; two of the lank boys had escaped, and in the perpetual exile of California and Colorado

had saved themselves alive. Their father talked of going, too, but ten years later he still dragged himself

spectrally about the labors of the farm, with the same cough at sixty which made his oldest son at

One soft noon in the middle of August the farmer came in from the cornfield that an early frost had

blighted, and told his wife that they must give it up. He said, in his weak, hoarse voice, with the catarrhal

catching in it, that it was no use trying to make a living on the farm any longer. The oats had hardly been

worth cutting, and now the corn was gone, and there was not hay enough without it to winter the stock; if

they got through themselves they would have to live on potatoes. Have a vendue, and sell out everything

before the snow flew, and let the State take the farm and get what it could for it, and turn over the balance

that was left after the taxes; the interest of the savingsbank mortgage would soon eat that up.

The long, loose cough took him, and another cough answered it like an echo from the barn, where his son was

giving the horses their feed. The mild, waneyed young man came round the corner presently toward the

porch where his father and mother were sitting, and at the same moment a boy came up the lane to the other

corner; there were sixteen years between the ages of the brothers, who alone were left of the children born

into and borne out of the house. The young man waited till they were within whispering distance of each

The boy answered, promptly, "None your business," and went up the steps before the young man, with a

lopeared, livercolored mongrel at his heels. He pulled off his ragged straw hat and flung it on the floor of

His father made no answer; his mother looked at the boy's hands and face, all of much the same earthen cast,

up to the eaves of his thatch of yellow hair, and said: "You go and wash yourself." At a certain light in his

mother's eye, which he caught as he passed into the house with his dog, the boy turned and cut a defiant

caper. The oldest son sat down on the bench beside his father, and they all looked in silence at the mountain

before them. They heard the boy whistling behind the house, with sputtering and blubbering noises, as if he

were washing his face while he whistled; and then they heard him singing, with a muffled sound, and sharp

breaks from the muffled sound, as if he were singing into the towel; he shouted to his dog and threatened

him, and the scuffling of his feet came to them through all as if he were dancing.

"I guess so," said the mother. The brother did not speak; he coughed vaguely, and let his head sink forward.

The mother said: "You don't want to go into that; we been all over it before. If it's come to the pinch, now, it's

The man did not answer directly. "If we could sell off now and get out to where Jim is in Californy, and get a

piece of land" He stopped, as if confronted with some difficulty which he had met before, but had hoped

His wife laughed grimly. "I guess, if the truth was known, we're too poor to get away."

"We're poor," he whispered back. He added, with a weak obstinacy: "I d'know as we're as poor as that comes

"Enough to get us out there, and then we should be on Jim's hands," said the woman.

"We should till spring, maybe. I d'know as I want to face another winter here, and I d'know as Jackson does."

The young man gasped back, courageously: "I guess I can get along here well enough."

The mother smiled as grimly as she had laughed. "I don't believe it 'll make you ten years richer, and that's

"I don't believe but what we should ha' done something with the place by spring. Or the State would," the

The voice of the boy broke in upon them from behind. "Say, mother, a'n't you never goin' to have dinner?" He

was standing in the doorway, with a startling cleanness of the hands and face, and a strange, wet sleekness of

His mother rose and went toward him; his father and brother rose like apparitions, and slanted after her at one

"Say," the boy called again to his mother, "there comes a peddler." He pointed down the road at the figure of

a man briskly ascending the lane toward the house, with a pack on his back and some strange appendages

The woman did not look round; neither of the men looked round; they all kept on indoors, and she said to

the boy, as she passed him: "I got no time to waste on peddlers. You tell him we don't want anything."

The boy waited for the figure on the lane to approach. It was the figure of a young man, who slung his burden

lightly from his shoulders when he arrived, and then stood looking at the boy, with his foot planted on the

The boy must have permitted these advances that he might inflict the greater disappointment when he spoke.

"Don't you?" the stranger returned. "I do. I want dinner. Go in and tell your mother, and then show me where

The bold ease of the stranger seemed to daunt the boy, and he stood irresolute. His dog came round the corner

of the house at the first word of the parley, and, while his master was making up his mind what to do, he

smelled at the stranger's legs. "Well, you can't have any dinner," said the boy, tentatively. The dog raised the

bristles on his neck, and showed his teeth with a snarl. The stranger promptly kicked him in the jaw, and the

dog ran off howling. "Come here, sir!" the boy called to him, but the dog vanished round the house with a

"Now, young man," said the stranger, "will you go and do as you're bid? I'm ready to pay for my dinner, and

you can say so." The boy stared at him, slowly taking in the facts of his costume, with eyes that climbed from

the heavy ,shoes up the legs of his thickribbed stockings and his knickerbockers, past the pleats and belt of

his Norfolk jacket, to the red neckcloth tied under the loose collar of his flannel outingshirt, and so by his

face, with its soft, young beard and its quiet eyes, to the top of his braidless, bandless slouch hat of soft felt. It

was one of the earliest costumes of the kind that had shown itself in the hill country, and it was altogether

new to the boy. "Come," said the wearer of it, "don't stand on the order of your going, but go at once," and he

sat down on the steps with his back to the boy, who heard these strange terms of command with a face of

The noonday sunshine lay in a thin, silvery glister on the slopes of the mountain before them, and in the

brilliant light the colossal forms of the Lion's Head were prismatically outlined against the speckless sky.

Through the silvery veil there burned here and there on the densely wooded acclivities the crimson torch of a

maple, kindled before its time, but everywhere else there was the unbroken green of the forest, subdued to

one tone of gray. The boy heard the stranger fetch his breath deeply, and then expel it in a long sigh, before

he could bring himself to obey an order that seemed to leave him without the choice of disobedience. He

came back and found the stranger as he had left him. "Come on, if you want your dinner," he said; and the

"Well, Thomas Jefferson Durgin, will you show me the way to the pump and bring a towel along?"

"Come along, then." The boy made a movement as if to lead the way indoors; the stranger arrested him.

"Here. Take hold of this and put it out of the rush of travel somewhere." He lifted his burden from where he

had dropped it in the road and swung it toward the boy, who ran down the steps and embraced it. As he

carried it toward a corner of the porch he felt of the various shapes and materials in it.

Then he said, " Come on!" again, and went before the guest through the dim hall running midway of the

house to the door at the rear. He left him on a narrow space of stone flagging there, and ran with a tin basin to

"Towel," he said, pulling at the family roller inside the little porch at the door; and he watched the stranger

Before the stranger had finished the father and the elder brother came out, and, after an ineffectual attempt to

salute him, slanted away to the barn together. The woman, indoors, was more successful, when he found her

in the diningroom, where the boy showed him. The table was set for him alone, and it affected him as if the

family had been hurried away from it that he might have it to himself. Everything was very simple: the iron

forks had two prongs; the knives bone handles; the dull glass was pressed; the heavy plates and cups were

white, but so was the cloth, and all were clean. The woman brought in a good boiled dinner of cornedbeef,

potatoes, turnips, and carrots from the kitchen, and a teapot, and said something about having kept them hot

on the stove for him; she brought him a plate of biscuit fresh from the oven; then she said to the boy, "You

come out and have your dinner with me, Jeff," and left the guest to make his meal unmolested.

The room was square, with two north windows that looked down the lane he had climbed to the house. An

open door led into the kitchen in an ell, and a closed door opposite probably gave access to a parlor or a

ground floor chamber. The windows were darkened down to the lower sash by green paper shades; the walls

were papered in a pattern of brown roses; over the chimney hung a large picture, a lifesize pencildrawing

of two little girls, one slightly older and slightly larger than the other, each with round eyes and precise

The guest seemed helpless to take his gaze from it, and he sat fallen back in his chair at it when the woman

"Thank you, I believe I don't want any dessert," he said. "The fact is, the dinner was so good that I haven't left

"Yes," said the woman, looking up at the picture with the pie in her hand. "They're the last two I lost."

"Well, it's a good deal like the photograph we had taken about a year before they died. It's a good likeness.

She seemed to refer the point to him for his judgment, but he answered wide of it:

"I came up here to paint your mountain, if you don't mind, Mrs. DurginLion's Head, I mean."

"Oh yes. Well, I don't know as we could stop you if you wanted to take it away." A spare glimmer lighted up

The painter rejoined in kind: "The town might have something to say, I suppose."

"Not if you was to leave a good piece of intervale in place of it. We've got mountains to spare."

The woman looked down, probably with an inward anxiety between the fear of asking too much and the folly

of asking too little. She said, tentatively: "Some of the folks that come over from the hotels say they pay as

The stranger relaxed the frown he had put on at the greed of her suggestion; it might have come from

ignorance or mere innocence. "I'm in the habit of paying five dollars for farm board, where I stay several

"I guess that 'll do," said the woman, and she went out with the pie, which she had kept in her hand.

The painter went round to the front of the house and walked up and down before it for different points of

view. He ran down the lane some way, and then came back and climbed to the sloping field behind the barn,

where he could look at Lion's Head over the roof of the house. He tried an open space in the orchard, where

he backed against the wall enclosing the little burialground. He looked round at it without seeming to see it,

and then went back to the level where the house stood. "This is the place," he said to himself. But the boy,

who had been lurking after him, with the dog lurking at, his own heels in turn, took the words as a proffer of

"Did you?" asked the painter, with a smile for the unsatisfied grudge in the boy's tone. "Why didn't you tell

The boy looked down, and apparently made up his mind to wait until something sufficiently severe should

come to him for a retort. "Want I should help you get your things?" he asked, presently.

"Why, yes," said the painter, with a glance of surprise. " I shall be much obliged for a lift." He started toward

the porch where his burden lay, and the boy ran before him. They jointly separated the knapsack from the

things tied to it, and the painter let the boy carry the easel and campstool which developed themselves from

their folds and hinges, and brought the colors and canvas himself to the spot he had chosen. The boy looked

at the tag on the easel after it was placed, and read the name on itJere Westover. "That's a funny name."

Again the boy cast down his eyes discomfited, and seemed again resolving silently to bide his time and watch

Westover forgot him in the fidget he fell into, trying this and that effect, with his head slanted one way and

then slanted the other, his hand held up to shut out the mountain below the granite mass of Lion's Head, and

then changed to cut off the sky above; and then both hands lifted in parallel to confine the picture. He made

some tentative scrawls on his canvas in charcoal, and he wasted so much time that the light on the

mountainside began to take the rich tone of the afternoon deepening to evening. A soft flush stole into it; the

sun dipped behind the top south of the mountain, and Lion's Head stood out against the intense clearness of

the west, which began to be flushed with exquisite suggestions of violet and crimson.

"Good Lord!" said Westover; and he flew at his colors and began to paint. He had got his canvas into such a

state that he alone could have found it much more intelligible than his palette, when he heard the boy saying,

over his shoulder: "I don't think that looks very much like it." He had last been aware of the boy sitting at the

grassy edge of the lane, tossing small bits of earth and pebble across to his dog, which sat at the other edge

and snapped at them. Then he lost consciousness of him. He answered, dreamily, while he found a tint he was

trying for with his brush: "Perhaps you don't know." He was so sure of his effect that the popular censure

"I doubt it," said Westover, and then he lost consciousness of him again. He was rapt deep and far into the joy

of his work, and had no thought but for that, and for the dim question whether it would be such another day

tomorrow, with that light again on Lion's Head, when he was at last sensible of a noise that he felt he must

have been hearing some time without noting it. It was a lamentable, sound of screaming, as of some one in

mortal terror, mixed with wild entreaties. " Oh, don't, Jeff! Oh, don't, don't, don't! Oh, please! Oh, do let us

Westover looked round bewildered, and not able, amid the clamor of the echoes, to make out where the cries

came from. Then, down at the point where the lane joined the road to the southward and the road lost itself in

the shadow of a woodland, he saw the boy leaping back and forth across the track, with his dog beside him;

he was shouting and his dog barking furiously; those screams and entreaties came from within the shadow.

Westover plunged down the lane headlong, with a speed that gathered at each bound, and that almost flung

him on his face when he reached the level where the boy and the dog were dancing back and forth across the

road. Then he saw, crouching in the edge of the wood, a little girl, who was uttering the appeals he had heard,

and clinging to her, with a face of frantic terror, a child of five or six years; her cries had grown hoarse, and

had a hard, mechanical action as they followed one another. They were really in no danger, for the boy held

his dog tight by his collar, and was merely delighting himself with their terror.

The painter hurled himself upon him, and, with a quick grip upon his collar, gave him half a dozen

"You infernal little ruffian!" he roared at him; and the sound of his voice was enough for the dog; he began to

The children still crouched together, and Westover could hardly make them understand that they were in his

keeping when he bent over them and bade them not be frightened. The little girl set about wiping the child's

eyes on her apron in a motherly fashion; her own were dry enough, and Westover fancied there was more of

fury than of fright in her face. She seemed lost to any sense of his presence, and kept on talking fiercely to

"Great, mean, ugly thing! I'll tell the teacher on him, that's what I will, as soon as ever school begins. I'll see

if he can come round with that dog of his scaring folks! I wouldn't 'a' been a bit afraid if it hadn't 'a' been for

Franky. Don't cry any more, Franky. Don't you see they're gone? I presume he thinks it smart to scare a little

She made no sign of gratitude to Westover: as far as any recognition from her was concerned, his intervention

was something as impersonal as if it had been a thunderbolt falling upon her enemies from the sky.

"Where do you live?" he asked. "I'll go home with you if you'll tell me where you live."

She looked up at him in a daze, and Westover heard the Durgin boy saying: "She lives right there in that little

woodcolored house at the other end of the lane. There ain't no call to go home with her."

Westover turned and saw the boy kneeling at the edge of a clump of bushes, where he must have struck; he

was rubbing, with a tuft of grass, at the dirt ground into the knees of his trousers.

The little, girl turned hawkishly upon him. "Not for anything you can do, Jeff Durgin!"

"There!" she said, giving a final pull and twitch to the dress of her brother, and taking him by the hand

"Let me have your other hand," said Westover, and, with the little boy between them, they set off toward the

point where the lane joined the road on the northward. They had to pass the bushes where Jeff Durgin was

crouching, and the little girl turned and made a face at him. "Oh, oh! I don't think I should have done that,"

"I don't care!" said the little girl. But she said, in explanation and partial excuse: "He tries to scare all the

Westover looked up toward the Durgin house with a return of interest in the canvas he had left in the lane on

the easel. Nothing had happened to it. At the door of the barn he saw the farmer and his eldest son slanting

forward and staring down the hill at the point he had come from. Mrs. Durgin was looking out from the

shelter of the porch, and she turned and went in with Jeff's dog at her skirts when Westover came in sight

Westover had his tea with the family, but nothing was said or done to show that any of them resented or even

knew of what had happened to the boy from him. Jeff himself seemed to have no grudge. He went out with

Westover, when the meal was ended, and sat on the steps of the porch with him, watching the painter watch

the light darken on the lonely heights and in the lonely depths around. Westover smoked a pipe, and the fire

gleamed and smouldered in it regularly with his breathing; the boy, on a lower' step, pulled at the long ears of

They were both silent till the painter asked: "What do you do here when you're not trying to scare little

The boy hung his head and said, with the effect of excusing a long arrears of uselessness: "I'm goin' to school

"There's one branch of your education that I should like to undertake if I ever saw you at a thing like that

The boy pulled so hard at the dog's ear that the dog gave a faint yelp of protest.

"Well, the next time I have you by the collar I won't let go, either," said the painter; but he felt an inadequacy

in his threat, and he imagined a superfluity, and he made some haste to ask: "who are they?"

"Whitwell is their name. They live in that little house where you took them. Their father's got a piece of land

on Zion's Head that he's clearin' off for the timber. Their mother's dead, and Cynthy keeps house. She's

always makin' up names and faces," added the boy. "She thinks herself awful smart. That Franky's a perfect

"Well, upon my word! You are a little ruffian," said Westover, and he knocked the ashes out of his pipe. "The

next time you meet that poor little creature you tell her that I think you're about the shabbiest chap I know,

and that I hope the teacher will begin where I left off with you and not leave blackguard enough in you to"

He stopped for want of a fitting figure, and the boy said: "I guess the teacher won't touch me."

Westover rose, and the boy flung his dog away from him with his foot. "Want I should show you where to

"Yes," said Westover, and the boy hulked in before him, vanishing into the dark of the interior, and presently

appeared with a lighted handlamp. He led the way upstairs to a front room looking down upon the porch

roof and over toward Zion's Head, which Westover could see dimly outlined against the night sky, when he

The room was neat, with greater comfort in its appointments than he hoped for. He tried the bed, and found it

hard, but of straw, and not the feathers he had dreaded; while the boy looked into the waterpitcher to see if it

Westover would have expected to wash in a tin basin at the back door, and wipe on the family towel, but all

the means of toilet, such as they were, he found at hand here, and a surprise which he had felt at a certain

touch in the cooking renewed itself at the intelligent arrangements for his comfort. A secondary quilt was laid

across the foot of his bed; his windowshade was pulled down, and, though the window was shut and the air

stuffy within, there was a sense of cleanliness in everything which was not at variance with the closeness.

The bed felt fresh when he got into it, and the sweet breath of the mountains came in so cold through the sash

he had lifted that he was glad to pull the secondary quilt up over him. He heard the clock tick in some room

below; from another quarter came the muffled sound of coughing; but otherwise the world was intensely still,

The men folks had finished their breakfast and gone to their farmwork hours before Westover came down to

his breakfast, but the boy seemed to be of as much early leisure as himself, and was lounging on the threshold

of the back door, with his dog in waiting upon him. He gave the effect of yesterday's cleanliness freshened up

with more recent soap and water. At the moment Westover caught sight of him, he heard his mother calling to

him from the kitchen, "Well, now, come in and get your breakfast, Jeff," and the boy called to Westover, in

turn, "I'll tell her you're here," as he rose and came indoors. "I guess she's got your breakfast for you."

Mrs. Durgin brought the breakfast almost as soon as Westover had found his way to the table, and she

lingered as if for some expression of his opinion upon it. The biscuit and the butter were very good, and he

said so; the eggs were fresh, and the hash from yesterday's cornedbeef could not have been better, and he

"Why, I'm used to making my own coffee; I lived so long in a country where it's nearly the whole of

breakfast that I got into the habit of it, and I always carry my little machine with me; but I don't like to bring

"Unless you can't stand the other folks's," said the woman, with a humorous gleam. "Well, you needn't mind

me. I want you should have good coffee, and I guess I a'n't too old to learn, if you want to show me. Our folks

don't care for it much; they like tea; and I kind of got out of the way of it. But at home we had to have it." She

"My father kept the tavern on the old road to St. Albans, on the other side of Lion's Head. That's where I

"Oh," said Westover, and he felt that she had proudly wished to account for a quality which she hoped he had

noticed in her cooking. He thought she might be going to tell him something more of herself, but she only

said, "Well, any time you want to show me your way of makin' coffee," and went out of the room.

That evening, which was the close of another flawless day, he sat again watching the light outside, when he

saw her come into the hallway with a large shadelamp in her hand. She stopped at the door of a room he had

He found her there when he came in, and her two sons with her; the younger was sleepily putting away some

"He's got to begin school next week," she said to Westover; and at the preparations the other now began to

make with a piece of paper and a planchette which he had on the table before him, she asked, in the half

mocking, halfdeprecating way which seemed characteristic of her: "You believe any in that?"

"Well, sometimes it won't work," she returned, altogether mockingly now, and sat holding her shapely hands,

which were neither so large nor so rough as they might have been, across her middle and watching her son

while the machine pushed about under his palm, and he bent his wan eyes upon one of the ovalframed

photographs on the wall, as if rapt in a supernal vision. The boy stared drowsily at the planchette, jerking this

way and that, and making abrupt starts and stops. At last the young man lifted his palm from it, and put it

The young man whispered: "I can't seem to make out very clear. I guess I got to take a little time to it," he

added, leaning back wearily in his chair. "Ever seen much of the manifestations?" he gasped at Westover.

"Never any, before," said the painter, with a leniency for the invalid which he did not feel for his belief.

The young man tried for his voice, and found enough of it to say: "There's a trance medium over at the

Huddle. Her control says 't I can develop into a writin' medium." He seemed to refer the fact as a sort of

question to Westover, who could think of nothing to say but that it must be very interesting to feel that one

"I guess he don't know he's got it yet," his mother interposed. "And planchette don't seem to know, either."

"We ha'n't given it a fair trial yet," said the young man, impartially, almost impassively.

"Wouldn't you like to see it do some of your sums, Jeff ?" said the mother to the drowsy boy, blinking in a

The father had not joined their circle in the parlor, now breaking up by common consent.

Mrs. Durgin took up her lamp again and looked round on the appointments of the room, as if she wished

Westover to note them, too: the drab wallpaper, the stiff chairs, the long, hard sofa in haircloth, the high

"You can come in here and set or lay down whenever you feel like it," she said. "We use it more than folks

Four or five days of perfect weather followed one another, and Westover worked hard at his picture in the

late afternoon light he had chosen for it. In the morning he tramped through the woods and climbed the hills

with Jeff Durgin, who seemed never to do anything about the farm, and had a leisure unbroken by anything

except a rare call from his mother to help her in the house. He built the kitchen fire, and got the wood for it;

he picked the belated pease and the early beans in the garden, and shelled them; on the Monday when the

school opened he did a share of the family wash, which seemed to have been begun before daylight, and

Westover saw him hanging out the clothes before he started off with his books. He suffered no apparent loss

of selfrespect in these employments, and, while he still had his days free, he put himself at Westover's

disposal with an effect of unimpaired equality. He had expected, evidently, that Westover would want to fish

or shoot, or at least join him in the hunt for woodchucks, which he still carried on with abated zeal for lack of

his company when the painter sat down to sketch certain bits that struck him. When he found that Westover

cared for nothing in the way of sport, as people commonly understand it, he did not openly contemn him. He

helped him get the flowers he studied, and he learned to know true mushrooms from him, though he did not

follow his teaching in eating the toadstools, as his mother called them, when they brought them home to be

If it could not be said that he shared the affection which began to grow up in Westover from their

companionship, there could be no doubt of the interest he took in him, though it often seemed the same

critical curiosity which appeared in the eye of his dog when it dwelt upon the painter. Fox had divined in his

way that Westover was not only not to be molested, but was to be respectfully tolerated, yet no gleam of

kindness ever lighted up his face at sight of the painter; he never wagged his tail in recognition of him; he

simply recognized him and no more, and he remained passive under Westover's advances, which he had the

effect of covertly referring to Jeff, when the boy was by, for his approval or disapproval; when he was not by,

the dog's manner implied a reservation of opinion until the facts could be submitted to his master.

On the Saturday morning which was the last they were to have together, the three comrades had strayed from

the vague wood road along one of the unexpected levels on the mountain slopes, and had come to a standstill

in a place which the boy pretended not to know his way out of. Westover doubted him, for he had found that

Jeff liked to give himself credit for woodcraft by discovering an escape from the depths of trackless

"Hark! What's that?" he said, hushing further speech from him with a motion of his hand. It was the sound of

"Oh, I know where we are," said Jeff. "It's that Canuck chopping in Whitwell's clearing. Come along."

He led the way briskly down the mountainside now, stopping from time to time and verifying his course by

the sound of the axe. This came and went, and byandby it ceased altogether, and Jeff crept forward with a

real or feigned uncertainty. Suddenly he stopped. A voice called, " Heigh, there!" and the boy turned and fled,

Westover looked after them, and then came forward. A lank figure of a man at the foot of a poplar, which he

had begun to fell, stood waiting him, one hand on his axehelve and the other on his hip. There was the scent

of freshly smitten bark and sapwood in the air; the ground was paved with broad, clean chips.

"How are you?" returned the other, without moving or making any sign of welcome for a moment. But then

he lifted his axe and struck it into the carf on the tree, and came to meet Westover.

As he advanced he held out his. hand. "Oh, you're the one that stopped that fellow that day when he was tryin'

to scare my children. Well, I thought I should run across you some time." He shook hands with Westover, in

token of the gratitude which did not express itself in words. "How are you? Treat you pretty well up at the

Durgins'? I guess so. The old woman knows how to cook, anyway. Jackson's about the best o' the lot above

ground, though I don't know as I know very much against the old man, either. But that boy! I declare I 'most

Whitwell, as Westover divined the man to be, took a seat himself on a high stump, which suited his length of

leg, and courteously waved Westover to a place on the log in front of him. A long, ragged beard of brown,

with lines of gray in it, hung from his chin and mounted well up on his thin cheeks toward his friendly eyes.

His mustache lay sunken on his lip, which had fallen in with the loss of his upper teeth. From the lower jaw a

"Well, well!" he said, with the air of wishing the talk to go on, but without having anything immediately to

Westover said, "Thank you," as he dropped on the log, and Whitwell added, relentingly: "I don't suppose a

He referred the point with a twinkle of his eyes to Westover, who said: "It's always a question, of course,

"Well, that's something so," said Whitwell, with pleasure in the distinction rather than assent. "But I guess it

ain't original sin in the boy. Got it from his gran'father pootty straight, I should say, and maybe the old man

"His father's father?" asked Westover, willing to humor Whitwell's evident wish to philosophize the Durgins'

"Mother's. He kept the old tavern stand on the west side of Lion's Head, on the St. Albans Road, and I guess

he kept a pootty good house in the old times when the stages stopped with him. Ever noticed how a man on

the mean side in politics always knows how to keep a hotel? Well, it's something curious. If there was ever a

mean side to any question, old Mason was on it. My folks used to live around there, and I can remember

when I was a boy hangin' around the barroom nights hearin' him argue that colored folks had no souls; and

along about the time the fugitive slave law was passed the folks pootty near run him out o' town for puttin'

the United States marshal on the scent of a fellow that was breakin' for Canada. Well, it was just so when the

war come. It was known for a fact that he was in with them Secesh devils up over the line that was plannin' a

raid into Vermont in '63. He'd got pootty low down by that time; railroads took off all the travel; tavern 'd got

to be a regular doggery; old man always drank some, I guess. That was a good while after his girl had married

Durgin. He was dead against it, and it broke him up consid'able when she would have him: Well, one night

Whitwell laughed with a pleasure in his satire which gave the monuments in his lower jaw a rather sinister

action. But, as if he felt a rebuke in Westover's silence, he added: "There ain't anything against Mis' Durgin.

She's done her part, and she's had more than her share of hard knocks. If she was tough, to sta't with, she's

had blows enough to meller her. But that's the way I account for the boy. I s'poseI'd oughtn't to feel the

way I do about him, but he's such a pest to the whole neighborhood that he'd have the most pop'la' fune'l.

"Couldn't be," said Whitwell, with a cackle of humorous enjoyment. "He has his spells of bein' decent, and

he's pootty smart, too. But when the other spell ketches him it's like as if the devil got ahold of him, as I said

in the first place. I lost my wife here twothree years along back, and that little girl you see him tormentin',

she's a regular little mother to her brother; and whenever Jeff Durgin sees her with him, seems as if the Old

Scratch got into him. Well, I'm glad I didn't come across him that day. How you gittin' along with Lion's

Head? Sets quiet enough for you?" Whitwell rose from the stump and brushed the clinging chips from his

"Well, there ain't a great many to," said Whitwell, going back to his axe. "I should like to see you workin'

"All right." Whitwell pulled his axe out of the carf, and struck it in again with a force that made a wide,

square chip leap out. He looked over his shoulder at Westover, who was moving away. "Say, stop in some

time you're passin'. I live in that woodcolored house at the foot of the Durgins' lane."

In a little sunken place, behind a rock, some rods away, Westover found Jeff lurking with his dog, both silent

"Come back to show you the way," said the boy. "Thought you couldn't find it alone."

"Oh, why didn't you say you'd wait?" The boy grinned. "I shouldn't think a fellow like you would want to be

afraid of any man, even for the fun of scaring a little girl." Jeff stopped grinning and looked interested, as if

this was a view of the case that had not occurred to him. "But perhaps you like to be afraid."

"I don't know as I do," said the boy, and Westover left him to the question a great part of the way home. He

did not express any regret or promise any reparation. But a few days after that, when he had begun to convoy

parties of children up to see Westover at work, in the late afternoon, on their way home from school, and to

show the painter off to them as a sort of family property, he once brought the young Whitwells. He seemed

on perfect terms with them now, and when the crowd of larger children hindered the little boy's view of the

picture, Jeff, in his quality of host, lifted him under his arms and held him up so that he could look as long as

The girl seemed ashamed of the good understanding before Westover. Jeff offered to make a place for her

among the other children who had looked long enough, but she pulled the front of her bonnet across her face

and said that she did not want to look, and caught her brother by the hand and ran away with him. Westover

thought this charming, somewhat; he liked the intense shyness which the child's intense passion had hidden

Jeff acted as host to the neighbors who came to inspect the picture, and they all came, within a circuit of

several miles around, and gave him their opinions freely or scantily, according to their several temperaments.

They were mainly favorable, though there was some frank criticism, too, spoken over the painter's shoulder

as openly as if he were not by. There was no question but of likeness; all finer facts were far from them; they

wished to see how good a portrait Westover had made, and some of them consoled him with the suggestion

Whitwell, when he came, attempted a larger view of the artist's work, but apparently more out of kindness for

him than admiration of the picture. He said he presumed you could not always get a thing like that just right

the first time, and that you had to keep trying till you did get it; but it paid in the end. Jeff had stolen down

from the house with his dog, drawn by the fascination which one we have injured always has for us; when

Whitwell suddenly turned upon him and asked, jocularly, "What do you think, Jeff?" the boy could only kick

He brought the teacher to see the picture the last Friday before the painter went away. She was a

coldlooking, austere girl, pretty enough, with eyes that wandered away from the young man, although Jeff

used all his arts to make her feel at home in his presence. She pretended to have merely stopped on her way

up to see Mrs. Durgin, and she did not venture any comment on the painting; but, when Westover asked

something about her school, she answered him promptly enough as to the number and ages and sexes of the

schoolchildren. He ventured so far toward a joke with her as to ask if she had much trouble with such a

tough subject as Jeff, and she said he could be good enough when he had a mind. If he could get over his

teasing, she said, with the air of reading him a lecture, she would not have anything to complain of; and Jeff

looked ashamed, but rather of the praise than the blame. His humiliation seemed complete when she said,

On the Tuesday following, Westover meant to go. It was the end of his third week, and it had brought him

into September. The weather since he had begun to paint Lion's Head was perfect for his work; but, with the

long drought, it had grown very warm. Many trees now had flamed into crimson on the hillslopes; the

yellowing corn in the fields gave out a thin, dry sound as the delicate wind stirred the blades; but only the

sounds and sights were autumnal. The heat was oppressive at midday, and at night the cold had lost its edge.

There was no dew, and Mrs. Durgin sat out with Westover on the porch while he smoked a final pipe there.

She had come to join him for some fixed purpose, apparently, and she called to her boy, "You go to bed,

Jeff," as if she wished to be alone with Westover; the men folks were already in bed; he could hear them

"Mr. Westover," the woman began, even as she swept her skirts forward before she sat down, "I want to ask

you whether you would let that picture of yours go on part board? I'll give you back just as much as you say

He looked round and saw that she had in the hand dropped in her lap the bills he had given her after supper.

"I presume you'll think I'm foolish," she pursued. "But I do want that picture; I don't know when I've ever

wanted a thing more. It's just like Lion's Head, the way I've seen it, day in and day out, every summer since I

"Mrs. Durgin," said Westover, "you gratify me more than I can tell you. I wishI wish I could let you have

"Why don't you let me have it, then? If we ever had to go away from hereif anything happened to usit's

the one thing I should want to keep and take with me. There! That's the way I feel about it. I can't explain; but

Some emotion which did not utter itself in the desire she expressed made her voice shake in the words. She

"Mrs. Durgin, I suppose I shall have to be frank with you, and you mustn't feel hurt. I have to live by my

"That's what I say. I don't want to beat you down on it. I'll give you whatever you think is right. It's my

"You don't quite understand," he said, gently. "I expect to have an exhibition of my pictures in Boston this

"Oh, don't mind," he begged; "it's all right. I've never had any offer for a picture that I'd rather take than

yours. I know the thing can't be altogether bad after what you've said. And I'll tell you what! I'll have it

"How much will that be?" Mrs. Durgin asked, as if taught caution by her offer for the painting.

"Nothing. And if you'll accept it and hang it up here somewhere I shall be very glad."

"Thank you," said Mrs. Durgin, and the meekness, the wounded pride, he fancied in her, touched him.

He did not know at first how to break the silence which she let follow upon her words. At last he said:

"You spoke, just now, about taking it with you. Of course, you don't think of leaving Lion's Head?"

She did not answer for so long a time that he thought she had not perhaps heard him or heeded what he said;

but she answered, finally: "We did think of it. The day you come we had about made up our minds to leave."

"But I've been thinkin' of something since you've been here that I don't know but you'll say is about as wild as

wantin' to buy a threehundred dollar picture with a week's board." She gave a short, selfscornful laugh;

"Well, it's this; and I wanted to ask you, anyway. You think there'd be any chance of my gettin' summer folks

to come here and board if I was to put an advertisement in a Boston paper? I know it's a lonesome place, and

there ain't what you may call attractions. But the folks from the hotels, sometimes, when they ride over in a

stage to see the view, praise up the scenery, and I guess it is sightly. I know that well enough; and I ain't

afraid but what I can do for boarders as well as some, if not better. What do you think?"

"It's that or go," she said. "There ain't a livin' for us on the farm any more, and we got to do somethin'. If there

was anything else I could do! But I've thought it out and thought it out, and I guess there ain't anything I can

"I should think you'd find it rather pleasant on some accounts. Your boarders would be company for you,"

"We're company enough for ourselves," said Mrs. Durgin. "I ain't ever been lonesome here, from the first

minute. I guess I had company enough when I was a girl to last me the sort that hotel folks are. I presume Mr.

"I don't presume he said anything that wa'n't true. It's all right. But I know how my mother used to slave, and

how I used to slave myself; and I always said I'd rather do anything than wait on boarders; and now I guess I

got to come to it. The sight of summer folks makes me sick! I guess I could 'a' had 'em long ago if I'd wanted

to. There! I've said enough." She rose, with a sudden lift of her powerful frame, and stood a moment as if

He said: "Well, when you've made your mind up, send your advertisement to me, and I'll attend to it for you."

The next morning he made ready for an early start, and in his preparations he had the zealous and even

affectionate help of Jeff Durgin. The boy seemed to wish him to carry away the best impression of him, or, at

least, to make him forget all that had been sinister or unpleasant in his behavior. They had been good

comrades since the first evil day; they had become good friends even; and Westover was touched by the boy's

devotion at parting. He helped the painter get his pack together in good shape, and he took pride in strapping

it on Westover's shoulders, adjusting and readjusting it with care, and fastening it so that all should be safe

and snug. He lingered about at the risk of being late for school, as if to see the last of the painter, and he

waved his hat to him when Westover looked back at the house from half down the lane. Then he vanished,

and Westover went slowly on till he reached that corner of the orchard where the slanting gravestones of the

family burialground showed above the low wall. There, suddenly, a storm burst upon him. The air rained

apples, that struck him on the head, the back, the side, and pelted in violent succession on his knapsack and

canvases, campstool and easel. He seemed assailed by four or five skilful marksmen, whose missiles all

When he could lift his face to look round he heard a shrill, accusing voice, "Oh, Jeff Durgin!" and he saw

another storm of apples fly through the air toward the little Whitwell girl, who dodged and ran along the road

below and escaped in the direction of the schoolhouse. Then the boy's face showed itself over the top of one

of the gravestones, all agrin with joy. He waited and watched Westover keep slowly on, as if nothing had

happened, and presently he let some apples fall from his hands and walked slowly back to the house, with his

When Westover reached the level of the road and the shelter of the woods near Whitwell's house, he

unstrapped his load to see how much harm had been done to his picture. He found it unhurt, and before he

had got the burden back again he saw Jeff Durgin leaping along the road toward the schoolhouse, whirling

his satchel of books about his head and shouting gayly to the girl, now hidden by the bushes at the other end

Westover, received next spring the copy for an advertisement from Mrs. Durgin, which she asked to have him

put in some paper for her. She said that her son Jackson had written it out, and Westover found it so well

written that he had scarcely to change the wording. It offered the best of farmboard, with plenty of milk and

eggs, berries and fruit, for five dollars a week at Lion's Head Farm, and it claimed for the farm the merit of

the finest view of the celebrated Lion's Head Mountain. It was signed, as her letter was signed, "Mrs. J. M.

The letter was in the same handwriting as the advertisement, which he took to be that of Jackson Durgin. It

enclosed a dollar note to pay for three insertions of the advertisement in the evening Transcript, and it ended,

almost casually: "I do not know as you have heard that my husband, James Monroe Durgin, passed to spirit

This death could not move Westover more than it had apparently moved the widow. During the three weeks

he had passed under his roof, he had scarcely exchanged three words with James Monroe Durgin, who

remained to him an impression of large, round, dullblue eyes, a stubbly upper lip, and cheeks and chin

tagged with coarse, haycolored beard. The impression was so largely the impression that he had kept of the

dull blue eyes and the gaunt, slanted figure of Andrew Jackson Durgin that he could not be very distinct in

his sense of which was now the presence and which the absence. He remembered, with an effort, that the

son's beard was strawcolored, but he had to make no effort to recall the robust effect of Mrs. Durgin and her

youngest son. He wondered now, as he had often wondered before, whether she knew of the final violence

which had avenged the boy for the prolonged strain of repression Jeff had inflicted upon himself during

Westover's stay at the farm. After several impulses to go back and beat him, to follow him to school and

expose him to the teacher, to write to his mother and tell her of his misbehavior, Westover had decided to do

nothing. As he had come off unhurt in person and property, he could afford to be more generously amused

than if he had suffered damage in either. The more he thought of the incident, the more he was disposed to be

lenient with the boy, whom he was aware of having baffled and subdued by his superior wit and virtue in

perhaps intolerable measure. He could not quite make out that it was an act of bad faith; there was no reason

to think that the goodnatured things the fellow had done, the constant little offices of zeal and friendliness,

The letter from Lion's Head Farm brought back his three weeks there very vividly, and made Westover wish

he was going there for the summer. But he was going over to France for an indefinite period of work in the

only air where he believed modern men were doing good things in the right way. He W a sale in the winter,

and he had sold pictures enough to provide the means for this sojourn abroad; though his lion's Head

Mountain had not brought the two hundred and fifty or three hundred dollars he had hoped for. It brought

only a hundred and sixty; but the time had almost come already when Westover thought it brought too much.

Now, the letter from Mrs. Durgin reminded him that he had never sent her the photograph of the picture

which he had promised her. He encased the photograph at once, and wrote to her with many avowals of

contrition for his neglect, and strong regret that he was not soon to see the original of the painting again. He

paid a decent reverence to the bereavement she had suffered, and he sent his regards to all, especially his

Five years later Westover came home in the first week of a gasping August, whose hot breath thickened

round the Cunarder before she got halfway up the harbor. He waited only to see his pictures through the

customhouse, and then he left for the mountains. The mountains meant Lion's Head for him, and eight hours

after he was dismounting from the train at a station on the road which had been pushed through on a new line

within four miles of the farm. It was called Lion's Head House now, as he read on the side of the

mountainwagon which he saw waiting at the platform, and he knew at a glance that it was Jeff Durgin who

The boy had been the prophecy of the man in even a disappointing degree. Westover had fancied him

growing up to the height of his father and brother, but Jeff Durgin's stalwart frame was notable for strength

rather than height. He could not have been taller than his mother, whose stature was above the standard of her

sex, but he was massive without being bulky. His chest was deep, his square shoulders broad, his powerful

legs bore him with a backward bulge of the calves that showed through his shapely trousers; he caught up the

trunks and threw them into the baggagewagon with a swelling of the muscles on his short, thick arms which

He had given one of these to Westover to shake when they met, but with something conditional in his

welcome, and with a look which was not so much furtive as latent. The thatch of yellow hair he used to wear

was now cropped close to his skull, which was a sort of duncolor; and it had some drops of sweat along the

lighter edge where his hat had shaded his forehead. He put his hat on the seat between himself and Westover,

and drove away from the station bareheaded, to cool himself after his bout with the baggage, which was

following more slowly in its wagon. There was a good deal of it, and there were half a dozen

peoplewomen, of coursegoing to Lion's Head House. Westover climbed to the place beside Jeff to let

them have the other two seats to themselves, and to have a chance of talking; but the ladies had to be quieted

in their several anxieties concerning their baggage, and the letters and telegrams they had sent about their

rooms, before they settled down to an exchange of apprehensions among themselves, and left Jeff Durgin free

"I don't know but I ought to have telegraphed you that I was coming," Westover said; "but I couldn't realize

that you were doing things on the hotel scale. Perhaps you won't have room for me?"

"I shouldn't wonder. If there's any one in it, I guess mother could change 'em."

"Is that so?" asked Westover, with a liking for being liked, which his tone expressed. "How is your mother?"

"That's what she says," answered Jeff, with a twinkle. All the time, while he was talking with Westover, he

was breaking out to his horses, which he governed with his voice, trotting them up hill and down, and

"Firstratethat is, for him. He's as well as ever he was, I guess, and he don't appear a day older. You've

"Yes; I'm twentynine now, and I wear a heavier beard." Westover noticed that Jeff was clean shaved of any

sign of an approaching beard, and artistically he rejoiced in the fellow's young, manly beauty, which was very

"I guess he keeps it up with Mr. Whitwell. He don't say much about it at home. He keeps all the books, and

"Well, I look after the transportation," said Jeff, with a nod toward his horses" when I'm at home, that is.

I've been at the Academy in Lovewell the last three winters, and that means a good piece of the summer, too,

"All right," said Westover. "What I don't know about education isn't worth knowing."

Jeff laughed, and said to the off horse, which seemed to know that he was meant: "Get up, there!"

"Yes; they're all down in the little woodcolored house yet. Cynthia teaches winters, and summers she helps

"Well, he talks to the ladies, and takes parties of 'em mountain climbing. I guess we couldn't get along

without Mr. Whitwell. He talks religion to 'em." He cast a mocking glance at Westover over his shoulder.

"Well," said Jeff, "we had to give Fox away. He was always cross with the boarders' children. My brother

"I didn't suppose," said Westover, "that I should have been sorry to miss Fox. But I guess I shall be."

Jeff seemed to enjoy the implication of his words. "He wasn't a bad dog. He was stupid."

When they arrived at the foot of the lane, mounting to the farm, Westover saw what changes had been made

in the house. There were large additions, tasteless and characterless, but giving the rooms that were needed.

There was a vulgar modernity in the new parts, expressed with a final intensity in the fourlight windows,

which are esteemed the last word of domestic architecture in the country. Jeff said nothing as they

approached the house, but Westover said: "Well, you've certainly prospered. You're quite magnificent."

They reached the old level in front of the house, artificially widened out of his remembrance, with a white

flagpole planted at its edge, and he looked up at the front of the house, which was unchanged, except that it

had been built a story higher back of the old front, and discovered the window of his old room. He could

hardly wait to get his greetings over with Mrs. Durgin and Jackson, who both showed a decorous pleasure

"All right, if you think so," she retorted. "You can have the old room, anyway."

Westover could not have said he felt very much at home on his first sojourn at the farm, or that he had cared

greatly for the Durgins. But now he felt very much at home, and as if he were in the hands of friends.

It was toward the close of the afternoon that he arrived, and he went in promptly to the meal that was served

shortly after. He found that the farmhouse had not evolved so far in the direction of a hotel as to have

reached the stage of a late dinner. It was tea that he sat down to, but when he asked if there were not

something hot, after listening to a catalogue of the cold meats, the spectacled waitress behind his chair

He found the steak excellent, though succinct, and he looked round in the distinction it conferred upon him,

on the older guests, who were served with cold ham, tongue, and cornedbeef. He had expected to be

appointed his place by Cynthia Whitwell, but Jeff came to the diningroom with him and showed him to the

From his impressions of the berries, the cream, the toast, and the tea, as well as the steak, he decided that on

the gastronomic side there could be no question but the Durgins knew how to keep a hotel; and his further

acquaintance with the house and its appointments confirmed him in his belief. All was very simple, but

sufficient; and no guest could have truthfully claimed that he was stinted in towels, in water, in lamp light,

in the quantity or quality of bedding, in hooks for clothes, or wardrobe or bureau room. Westover made Mrs.

Durgin his sincere compliments on her success as they sat in the old parlor, which she had kept for herself

"But I don't know as I should ever had the courage to try it if it hadn't been for you happening along just

"If you want to call them fortunes. We don't complain It's been a fight, but I guess we've got the best of it.

The house is full, and we're turnin' folks away. I guess they can't say that at the big hotels they used to drive

over from to see Lion's Head at the farm." She gave a low, comfortable chuckle, and told Westover of the

struggle they had made. It was an interesting story and pathetic, like all stories of human endeavor the efforts

of the most selfish ambition have something of this interest; and the struggle of the Durgins had the grace of

"And is Jeff as well satisfied as the rest?" Westover asked, after other talk and comment on the facts.

"Too much so," said Mrs. Durgin. "I should like to talk with you about Jeff, Mr. Westover; you and him was

"Why, it's just this. I don't see why Jeff shouldn't do something besides keep a hotel."

Westover's eyes wandered to the photograph of his painting of Lion's Head which hung over the mantelpiece,

in what he felt to be the place of the greatest honor in the whole house, and a sudden fear came upon him that

perhaps Jeff had developed an artistic talent in the belief of his family. But he waited silently to hear.

"We did think that before we got through the improvements last spring a year ago we should have to get the

savingsbank to put a mortgage on the place; but we had just enough to start the season with, and we thought

we would try to pull through. We had a splendid season, and made money, and this year we're doin' so well

that I ain't afraid for the future any more, and I want to give Jeff a chance in the world. I want he should go to

Westover felt all the boldness of the aspiration, but it was at least not in the direction of art. "Wouldn't you

"We should, some. But he would be here the best part of the summer, in his vacations, and Jackson and I are

"He's better. He's only thirtyfour years old. His father lived to be sixty, and he had the same kind. Jeff tell

"He done well there. All his teachers that he ever had," Mrs. Durgin went on, with the motherpride that soon

makes itself tiresome to the listener, "said Jeff done well at school when he had a mind to, and at the

Academy he studied real hard. I guess," said Mrs. Durgin, with her chuckle, "that he thought that was goin' to

be the end of it. One thing, he had to keep up with Cynthy, and that put him on his pride. You seen Cynthy

"I guess I'm in charge of the whole house," said Mrs. Durgin. "Cynthy's the housekeeper, though. She's a fine

girl, and a smart girl," said Mrs. Durgin, with a visible relenting from some grudge, "and she'll do well

wherever you put her. She went to the Academy the first two winters Jeff did. We've about scooped in the

whole Whitwell family. Franky's here, and his father'swell, his father's kind of philosopher to the lady

boarders." Mrs. Durgin laughed, and Westover laughed with her. "Yes, I want Jeff should go to college, and I

Westover did not find that he had anything useful to say to this; so he said: "I've no doubt it's better than

"I'm not so sure; three hundred dollars for a little thing like that." She indicated the photograph of his Lion's

Head, and she was evidently so proud of it that he reserved for the moment the truth as to the price he had got

for the painting. "I was surprised when you sent me a photograph full as big. I don't let every one in here, but

a good many of the ladies are artists themselvesamateurs, I guessand first and last they all want to see it. I

guess they'll all want to see you, Mr. Westover. They'll be wild, as they call it, when they know you're in the

" Well, I guess you'll think I'm about as forthputting as I was when I wanted you to give me a

"Well, it's a shame. Any rate, three hundred's the price to all my boarders. My, if I've told that story once, I

Mrs. Durgin laughed at herself jollily, and Westover noted how prosperity had changed her. It had freed her

tongue, it has brightened her humor, it had cheered her heart; she had put on flesh, and her stalwart frame was

"Well, there," she said, "the long and the short of it is, I want Jeff should go to Harvard."

Mrs. Durgin called out, "Come in, Jackson," and Westover looked round and saw the elder son like a gaunt

shadow in the doorway. "I've just got where I've told Mr. Westover where I want Jeff should go. It don't seem

"I presume," said Jackson, coming in and sitting lankly down in the feathercushioned rockingchair which

his mother pushed toward him with her foot, "that the expense would be more at Harvard than it would at the

"I suppose it would cost more," Westover answered Jackson's conjecture. "I really don't know much about it.

One hears tremendous stories at Boston of the rate of living among the swell students in Cambridge. People

talk of five thousand a year, and that sort of thing." Mrs. Durgin shut her lips, after catching her breath. "But I

fancy that it's largely talk. I have a friend whose son went through Harvard for a thousand a year, and I know

"I guess we can manage to let Jeff have a thousand a year," said Mrs. Durgin, proudly, "and not scrimp very

She looked at her elder son, who said: "I don't believe but what we could. It's more of a question with me

what sort of influence Jeff would come under there. I think he's pretty much spoiled here."

"I've heard," said Westover, "that Harvard takes the nonsense out of a man. I can't enter into what you say,

and it isn't my affair; but in regard to influence at Harvard, it depends upon the set Jeff is thrown with or

throws himself with. So, at least, I infer from what I've heard my friend say of his son there. There are

hardworking sets, loafing sets, and fast sets; and I suppose it isn't different at Harvard in such matters from

Mrs. Durgin looked a little grave. "Of course," she said, " we don't know anybody at Cambridge, except some

ladies that boarded with us one summer, and I shouldn't want to ask any favor of them. The trouble would be

Westover surmised a good many things, but in the absence of any confidences from the Durgins he could not

tell just how much Jackson meant in saying that Jeff was pretty much spoiled, or how little. At first, from

Mrs. Durgin's prompt protest, he fancied that Jackson meant that the boy had been overindulged by his

mother: "I understand," he said, in default of something else to say, "that the requirements at Harvard are

"He's passed his preliminary examinations," said Jackson, with a touch of hauteur, "and I guess he can enter

this fall if we should so decide. He'll have some conditions, prob'ly, but none but what he can work off, I

"Then, if you wish to have him go to college, by all means let him go to Harvard, I should say. It's our great

university and our oldest. I'm not a college man myself; but, if I were, I should wish to have been a Harvard

man. If Jeff has any nonsense in him, it will take it out; and I don't believe there's anything in Harvard, as

"I've heard," Westover continued, and he rose and stood while he spoke, "that Harvard's like the world. A

man gets on there on the same terms that he gets on in the world. He has to be a man, and he'd better be a

Mrs. Durgin still looked serious. "Have you come back to Boston for good now? Do you expect to be there

"I've taken a studio there. Yes, I expect to be in Boston now. I've taken to teaching, and I fancy I can make a

"We should be ever so much obliged to you," said his mother, with an air of great relief.

"Not at all. I shall be very glad. Your mountain air is drugging me, Mrs. Durgin. I shall have to say

goodnight, or I shall tumble asleep before I get upstairs. Oh, I can find the way, I guess; this part of the

house seems the same." He got away from them, and with the lamp that Jackson gave him found his way to

his room. A few moments later some one knocked at his door, and a boy stood there with a pitcher. "Some

"I'm pretty well," said the boy, shyly. He was a very handsome little fellow of distinctly dignified presence,

and Westover was aware at once that here was not a subject for patronage. "Is there anything else you want,

Mr. Westover? Matches, or soap, or anything?" He put the pitcher down and gave a keen glance round the

"Well, goodnight," said the boy, and he slipped out, quietly closing the door after him.

Westover pushed up his window and looked at Lion's Head in the moonlight. It slumbered as if with the sleep

of centuriesaustere, august. The moon rays seemed to break and splinter on the outline of the lionshape,

In the old porch under his window Westover heard whispering. Then, "You behave yourself, Jeff Durgin!"

came in a voice which could be no other than Cynthia Whitwell's, and Jeff Durgin's laugh followed.

He saw the girl in the morning. She met him at the door of the dining room, and he easily found in her shy,

proud manner, and her pure, cold beauty, the temperament and physiognomy of the child he remembered.

She was tall and slim, and she held herself straight without stiffness; her face was fine, with a straight nose,

and a decided chin, and a mouth of the same sweetness which looked from her still, gray eyes; her hair, of the

average brown, had a rough effect of being quickly tossed into form, which pleased him; as she slipped down

the room before him to place him at table he saw that she was, as it were, involuntarily, unwillingly graceful.

She made him think of a wild sweetbrier, of a hermitthrush; but, if there were this sort of poetic suggestion

in Cynthia's looks, her acts were of plain and honest prose, such as giving Westover the pleasantest place and

He would have liked to keep her in talk a moment, but she made business like despatch of all his allusions

to the past, and got herself quickly away. Afterward she came back to him, with the effect of having forced

She seemed glad of his being there, but helpless against the instincts or traditions that forbade her to show her

pleasure in his presence. Her reticence became almost snubbing in its strictness when he asked her about her

schoolteaching in the winter; but he found that she taught at the little schoolhouse at the foot of the hill,

"And have you any bad boys that frighten little girls in your school?" he asked, jocosely.

"I don't know as I have," she said, with a consciousness that flamed into her cheeks.

"I presume," she said, stiffly, "that there's room for improvement in every one," and then, as if she were

afraid he might take this personally, she looked unhappy and tried to speak of other things. She asked him if

he did not see a great many changes at Lion's Head; he answered, gravely, that he wished he could have

found it just as he left it, and then she must have thought she had gone wrong again, for she left him in an

After breakfast Westover walked out and saw Whitwell standing on the grass in front of the house, beside the

flagstaff. He suffered Westover to make the first advances toward the renewal of their acquaintance, but

when he was sure of his friendly intention he responded with a cordial openness which the painter had

fancied wanting in his children. Whitwell had not changed much. The most noticeable difference was the

compact phalanx of new teeth which had replaced the staggering veterans of former days, and which

displayed themselves in his smile of relenting. There was some novelty of effect also in an arrangement of

things in his hatband. At first Westover thought they were fishhooks and artificial flies, such as the guides

wear in the Adirondacks to advertise their calling about the hotel offices and the piazzas. But another glance

showd him that they were sprays and wild flowers of various sorts, with gay mosses and fungi and some

Whitwell seemed pleased that these things should have caught Westover's eye. He said, almost immediately:

"Lookin' at my almanac? This is one of our fielddays; we have 'em once a week; and I like to let the ladies

see beforehand what nature's got on the bill for 'em, in the woods and pastur's."

"It's a good idea," said Westover, "and it's fresh and picturesque." Whitwell laughed for pleasure.

"They told me what a consolation you were to the ladies, with your walks and talks."

"I don't, on purpose. But it's the only sex here, threefourths of the time. Even the children are mostly all

girls. When the husbands come up Saturday nights, they don't want to go on a tramp Sundays. They want to

lay off and rest. That's about how it is. Well, you see some changes about Lion's Head, I presume?" he asked,

"I should rather have found the old farm. But I must say I'm glad to find such a good hotel."

"Jeff and his mother made their brags to you?" said Whitwell, with a kind of amiable scorn. "I guess if it

wa'n't for Cynthy she wouldn't know where she was standin', half the time. It don't matter where Jeff stands, I

guess. Jackson's the best o' the lot, now the old man's gone." There was no one by at the moment to hear these

injuries except Westover, but Whitwell called them out with a frankness which was perhaps more carefully

adapted to the situation than it seemed. Westover made no attempt to parry them formally; but he offered

some generalities in extenuation of the unworthiness of the Durgins, which Whitwell did not altogether

"Oh, it's ail right. Old woman talk to you about Jeff's going to college? I thought so. Wants to make another

Dan'el Webster of him. Guess she can's far forth as Dan'el's graduatin' went." Westover tried to remember

how this had been with the statesman, but could not. Whitwell added, with intensifying irony so of look and

tone: "Guess the second Dan'el won't have a chance to tear his degree up; guess he wouldn't ever b'en ready

to try for it if it had depended on him. They don't keep any record at Harvard, do they, of the way fellows are

"Oh, nothin'. You get a chance some time to ask Jeff who done most of his studyin' for him at the Academy."

This hint was not so darkling but Westover could understand that Whitwell attributed Jeff's scholarship to the

help of Cynthia, but he would not press him to an open assertion of the fact. There was something painful in

it to him; it had the pathos which perhaps most of the success in the world would reveal if we could penetrate

He was silent, and Whitwell left the point. "Well," he concluded, "what's goin' on in them old European

"Oh, the old thing," said Westover. "But I can't speak for any except France, very well."

"What's their republic like, over there? Ours? See anything of it, how it works?"

"Good!" Whitwell slapped his leg. Westover saw that he had on long Indiarubber boots, which came up to

his knees, and he gave a wayward thought to the misery they would be on an August day to another man; but

Whitwell was probably insensible to any discomfort from them. "When a man's mindin' his own business any

government's good, I guess. But I should like to prowl round some them places where they had the worst

scenes of the Revolution, Ever been in the Place de la Concorde?" Whitwell gave it the full English

"I want to know! And that column that they, pulled down in the Commune that had that little Boney on

"Well, it's funny," said the philosopher, "how the world seems to always come out at the same hole it went in

at!" He paused, with his mouth open, as if to let the notion have full effect with Westover.

"Yes, I like my own house. They've wanted me to come up here often enough, but I'm satisfied where I am.

It's quiet down there, and, when I get through for the day, I can read. And I like to keep my family together.

Cynthy and Frank always sleep at home, and Jombateeste eats with me. You remember Jombateeste?"

"Well, I don't know as you did see him much. He was that Canuck I had helpin' me clear that piece over on

Lion's Head for the pulpmill; pulp mill went all to thunder, and I never got a cent. And sometimes Jackson

"Yes. But he's never developed much himself. He can't seem to do much without the plantchette. We've had

Whitwell did not answer, and Westover saw his eye wander. He looked round. Several ladies were coming

across the grass toward him from the hotel, lifting their skirts and tiptoeing through the dew. They called to

him, "Goodmorning, Mr. Whitwell!" and "Are you going up Lion's Head today?" and " Don't you think it

will rain?" "Guess not," said Whitwell, with a fatherly urbanity and an air of amusement at the anxieties of

the sex which seemed habitual to him. He waited tranquilly for them to come up, and then asked, with a wave

of his hand toward Westover: "Acquainted with Mr. Westover, the attist?" He named each of them, and it

would have been no great vanity in Westover to think they had made their little movement across the grass

quite as much in the hope of an introduction to him as in the wish to consult Whitwell about his plans.

The painter found himself the centre of an agreeable excitement with all the ladies in the house. For this it

was perhaps sufficient to be a man. To be reasonably young and decently goodlooking, to be an artist, and

He liked finding himself in the simple and innocent American circumstance again, and he was not sorry to be

confronted at once with one of the most characteristic aspects of our summer. He could read in the present

development of Lion's Head House all the history of its evolution from the first conception of farmboard,

which sufficed the earliest comers, to its growth in the comforts and conveniences which more fastidious

tastes and larger purses demanded. Before this point was reached, the boarders would be of a good and

wholesome sort, but they would be people of no social advantages, and not of much cultivation, though they

might be intelligent; they would certainly not be fashionable; five dollars a week implied all that, except in

the case of some wandering artist or the family of some poor young professor. But when the farm became a

boardinghouse and called itself a hotel, as at present with Lion's Head House, and people paid ten dollars a

week, or twelve for transients, a moment of its character was reached which could not be surpassed when its

prosperity became greater and its inmates more pretentious. In fact, the people who can afford to pay ten

dollars a week for summer board, and not much more, are often the best of the American people, or, at least,

of the New England people. They may not know it, and those who are richer may not imagine it. They are apt

to be middleaged maiden ladies from university towns, living upon carefully guarded investments; young

married ladies with a scant child or two, and needing rest and change of air; college professors with nothing

but their modest salaries; literary men or women in the beginning of their tempered success; clergymen and

their wives away from their churches in the larger country towns or the smaller suburbs of the cities; here and

there an agreeable bachelor in middle life, fond of literature and nature; hosts of young and pretty girls with

distinct tastes in art, and devoted to the clever young painter who leads them to the sources of inspiration in

the fields and woods. Such people are refined, humane, appreciative, sympathetic; and Westover, fresh from

the life abroad where life is seldom so free as ours without some stain, was glad to find himself in the midst

of this unrestraint, which was so sweet and pure. He had seen enough of rich people to know that riches

seldom bought the highest qualities, even among his fellowcountrymen who suppose that riches can do

everything, and the first aspects of society at Lion's Head seemed to him Arcadian. There really proved to be

a shepherd or two among all that troop of shepherdesses, old and young; though it was in the middle of the

week, remote alike from the Saturday of arrivals and the Monday of departures. To be sure, there was none

quite so young as himself, except Jeff Durgin, who was officially exterior to the social life.

The painter who gave lessons to the ladies was already a man of forty, and he was strongly dragoned round

by a wife almost as old, who had taken great pains to secure him for herself, and who worked him to far

greater advantage in his profession than he could possibly have worked himself: she got him orders; sold his

pictures, even in Boston, where they never buy American pictures; found him pupils, and kept the boldest of

these from flirting with him. Westover, who was so newly from Paris, was able to console him with talk of

the salons and ateliers, which he had not heard from so directly in ten years. After the first inevitable moment

of jealousy, his wife forgave Westover when she found that he did not want pupils, and she took a leading

part in the movement to have him read Browning at a picnic, organized by the ladies shortly after he came.

The picnic was held in Whitwell's Clearing, on the side of Lion's Head, where the moss, almost as white as

snow, lay like belated drifts among the tall, thin grass which overran the space opened by the axe, and crept

to the verge of the low pines growing in the shelter of the loftier woods. It was the end of one of Whitwell's

"Tramps Home to Nature," as he called his walks and talks with the ladies, and on this day Westover's

fellowpainter had added to his lessons in woodlore the claims of art, intending that his class should make

studies of various bits in the clearing, and should try to catch something of its peculiar charm. He asked

Westover what he thought of the notion, and Westover gave it his approval, which became enthusiastic when

he saw the place. He found in it the melancholy grace, the poignant sentiment of ruin which expresses itself

in some measure wherever man has invaded nature and then left his conquest to her again. In Whitwell's

Clearing the effect was intensified by the approach on the fading wood road, which the wagons had made in

former days when they hauled the fallen timber to the pulpmill. In places it was so vague and faint as to be

hardly a trail; in others, where the wheeltracks remained visible, the trees had sent out a new growth of

lower branches in the place of those lopped away, and almost forbade the advance of footpassengers. The

ladies said they did not see how Jeff was ever going to get through with the wagon, and they expressed fears

But Whitwell, who was leading them on, said: "You let a Durgin alone to do a thing when he's made up his

mind to it. I guess you'll have your lunch all right"; and by the time that they had got enough of Browning

they heard the welcome sound of wheels crashing upon dead boughs and swishing through the underbrush,

and, in the pauses of these pleasant noises, the voice of Jeff Durgin encouraging his horses. The children of

the party broke away to meet him, and then he came in sight ahead of his team, looking strong and handsome

in his keeping with the scene: Before he got within hearing, the ladies murmured a hymn of praise to his type

of beauty; they said he looked like a young Hercules, and Westover owned with an inward smile that Jeff had

certainly made the best of himself for the time being. He had taken a leaf from the book of the summer folks;

his stalwart calves revealed themselves in thick, ribbed stockings; he wore knickerbockers and a Norfolk

jacket of corduroy; he had style as well as beauty, and he had the courage of his clothes and looks. Westover

was still in the first surprise of the American facts, and he wondered just what part in the picnic Jeff was to

bear socially. He was neither quite host nor guest; but no doubt in the easy play of the life, which Westover

was rather proud to find so charming, the question would solve itself rationally and gracefully.

"Where do you want the things?" the young fellow asked of the company at large, as he advanced upon them

from the green portals of the roadway, pulling off his soft wool hat, and wiping his wet forehead with his

"Oh, right here, Jeff!" The nimblest of the nymphs sprang to her feet from the lounging and crouching circle

about Westover. She was a young nymph no longer, but with a daughter not so much younger than herself as

to make the contrast of her sixteen years painful. Westover recognized the officious, selfapproving kind of

the woman, but he admired the brisk efficiency with which she had taken possession of the affair from the

When the cloths were laid on the smooth, elastic moss, and the meal was spread, she heaped a plate without

"I suppose you've got to go back to your horses, Jeff, and you shall be the first served," she said, and she

offered him the plate with a bright smile and friendly grace, which were meant to keep him from the hurt of

Jeff did not offer to take the plate which she raised to him from where she was kneeling, but looked down at

her with perfect intelligence. "I guess I don't want anything," he said, and turned and walked away into the

The illadvised woman remained kneeling for a moment with her ingratiating smile hardening on her face,

while the sense of her blunder petrified the rest. She was the first to recover herself, and she said, with a

laugh that she tried to make reckless, "Well, friends, I suppose the rest of you are hungry; I know I am," and

The others ate, too, though their appetites might well have been affected by the diplomatic behavior of

Whitwell. He would not take anything, just at present, he said, and got his long length up from the root of a

tree where he had folded it down. "I don't seem to care much for anything in the middle of the day;

"Really," said the lady, "what did they expect?" But the question was so difficult that no one seemed able to

The incident darkened the day and spoiled its pleasure; it cast a lessening shadow into the evening when the

The next morning the ladies assembled again on the piazza to decide what should be done with the beautiful

day before them. Whitwell stood at the foot of the flagstaff with one hand staying his person against it, like

a figure posed in a photograph to verify proportions in the different features of a prospect.

The heroine of the unhappy affair of the picnic could not forbear authorizing herself to invoke his opinion at a

certain point of the debate, and "Mr. Whitwell," she called to him, "won't you please come here a moment?"

Whitwell slowly pulled himself across the grass to the group, and at the same moment, as if she had been

waiting for him to be present, Mrs. Durgin came out of the office door and advanced toward the ladies.

"Mrs. Marven," she said, with the stony passivity which the ladies used to note in her when they came over to

Lion's Head Farm in the tallyhos, "the stage leaves here at two o'clock to get the down train at three. I want

Mrs. Durgin did not answer. She let her steadfast look suffice; and Mrs. Marven went on in a rising flutter:

"Why, you can't have my rooms! I don't understand you. I've taken my rooms for the whole of August, and

"Very well, then, I won't give them up," said the lady. "A bargain's a bargain, and I have your agreement"

"If you're not out of your rooms by two o'clock, your things will be put out; and after dinner today you will

Mrs. Durgin went in, and it remained for the company to make what they could of the affair. Mrs. Marven did

not wait for the result. She was not a dignified person, but she rose with hauteur and whipped away to her

rooms, hers no longer, to make her preparations. She knew at least how to give her going the effect of

The incident of her expulsion was brutal, but it was clearly meant to be so. It made Westover a little sick, and

he would have liked to pity Mrs. Marven more than he could. The ladies said that Mrs. Durgin's behavior was

an outrage, and they ought all to resent it by going straight to their own rooms and packing their things and

leaving on the same stage with Mrs. Marven. None of them did so, and their talk veered around to something

"I suppose," one of them said, "that she felt more indignant about it because she has been so very good to

Mrs. Marven, and her daughter, too. They were both sick on her hands here for a week after they came, first

one and then the other, and she looked after them and did for them like a mother."

"And yet," another lady suggested, "what could Mrs. Marven have done? What did she do? He wasn't asked

to the picnic, and I don't see why he should have been treated as a guest. He was there, purely and simply, to

bring the things and take them away. And, besides, if there is anything in distinctions, in differences, if we

"That is true," the ladies said, in one form or another, with the tone of conviction; but they were not so deeply

convinced that they did not want a man's opinion, and they all looked at Westover.

He would not respond to their look, and the lady who had argued for Mrs. Marven had to ask: "What do you

"Ah, it's a difficult question," he said. "I suppose that as long as one person believes himself or herself

socially better than another, it must always be a fresh problem what to do in every given case."

The ladies said they supposed so, and they were forced to make what they could of wisdom in which they

Westover went away from them in a perplexed mind which was not simplified by the contempt he had at the

bottom of all for something unmanly in Jeff, who had carried his grievance to his mother like a slighted boy,

The sympathy for Mrs. Marven mounted again when it was seen that she did not come to dinner, or permit

her daughter to do so, and when it became known later that she had refused for both the dishes sent to their

rooms. Her farewells to the other ladies, when they gathered to see her off on the stage, were airy rather than

cheery; there was almost a demonstration in her behalf, but Westover was oppressed by a kind of inherent

At night he responded to a knock which he supposed that of Frank Whitwell with icewater, and Mrs. Durgin

came into his room and sat down in one of his two chairs. "Mr. Westover," she said, "if you knew all I had

done for that woman and her daughter, and how much she had pretended to think of us all, I don't believe

"Judge you!" cried Westover. "Bless my soul, Mrs. Durgin! I haven't said a word that could be tormented into

"I have not been at all able to satisfy myself on that point, Mrs. Durgin. I think it's always wrong to revenge

"Yes, I suppose it is," said Mrs. Durgin, humbly; and the tears came into her eyes. "I got the tray ready with

my own hands that was sent to her room; but she wouldn't touch it. I presume she didn't like having a plate

prepared for her! But I did feel sorry for her. She a'n't over and above strong, and I'm afraid she'll be sick;

Westover fancied this a fit mood in Mrs. Durgin for her further instruction, and he said: "And if you'll excuse

More tears flashed into Mrs. Durgin's eyes, but they were tears of wrath now. "I would 'a' done it," she said,

"if I thought every single one of 'em would 'a' left the house the next minute, for there a'n't one that has the

first word to say against me, any other way. It wa'n't that I cared whether she thought my son was good

enough to eat with her or not; I know what I think, and that's enough for me. He wa'n't invited to the picnic,

and he a'n't one to put himself forward. If she didn't want him to stay, all she had to do was to do nothin'. But

to make him up a plate before everybody, and hand it to him to eat with the horses, like a tramp or a

dog"Mrs. Durgin filled to the throat with her wrath, and the sight of her made Westover keenly unhappy.

"Yes, yes," he said, " it was a miserable business." He could not help adding: "If Jeff could have kept it to

"Mr. Westover!" said Mrs. Durgin, sternly. "Do you think Jeff would come to me, like a great crybaby, and

complain of my lady boarders and the way they used him? It was Mr. Whit'ell that let it out, or I don't know

"I'm glad Jeff didn't tell you," said Westover, with a revulsion of good feeling toward him.

"He'd 'a' died first," said his mother. "But Mr. Whit'ell done just right all through, and I sha'n't soon forget it.

Jeff's give me a proper goin' over for what I done; both the boys have. But I couldn't help it, and I should do

just so again. All is, I wanted you should know just what you was blamin' me for"

"I don't know that I blame you. I only wish you could have helped it managed some other way."

"I did try to get over it, and all I done was to lose a night's rest. Then, this morning, when I see her settin'

there so cool and mighty with the boarders, and takin' the lead as usual, I just waited till she got Whit'ell

across, and nearly everybody was there that saw what she done to Jeff, and then I flew out on her."

Westover could not suppress a laugh. "Well, Mrs. Durgin, your retaliation was complete; it was dramatic."

"I don't know what you mean by that," said Mrs. Durgin, rising and resuming her selfcontrol; she did not

refuse herself a grim smile. "But I guess she thought it was pretty perfect herselfor she will, when she's

able to give her mind to it. I'm sorry for her daughter; I never had anything against her; or her mother, either,

for that matter, before. Franky look after you pretty well? I'll send him up with your icewater. Got

"Well, I should like to have you do it. We can't ever do too much for you. Well, goodnight, Mr. Westover."

Jeff Durgin entered Harvard that fall, with fewer conditions than most students have to work off. This was set

down to the credit of Lovewell Academy, where he had prepared for the university; and some observers in

such matters were interested to note how thoroughly the old school in a remote town had done its work for

None who formed personal relations with him at that time conjectured that he had done much of the work for

himself, and even to Westover, when Jeff came to him some weeks after his settlement in Cambridge, he

seemed painfully out of his element, and unamiably aware of it. For the time, at least, he had lost the jovial

humor, not too kindly always, which largely characterized him, and expressed itself in sallies of irony which

were not so unkindly, either. The painter perceived that he was on his guard against his own friendly interest;

Jeff made haste to explain that he came because he had told his mother that he would do so. He scarcely

invited a return of his visit, and he left Westover wondering at the sort of vague rebellion against his new life

which he seemed to be in. The painter went out to see him in Cambridge, not long after, and was rather glad

to find him rooming with some other rustic Freshman in a humble street running from the square toward the

river; for he thought Jeff must have taken his lodging for its cheapness, out of regard to his mother's means.

But Jeff was not glad to be found there, apparently; he said at once that he expected to get a room in the Yard

the next year, and eat at Memorial Hall. He spoke scornfully of his boardinghouse as a place where they

were all a lot of jays together; and Westover thought him still more at odds with his environment than he had

before. But Jeff consented to come in and dine with him at his restaurant, and afterward go to the theatre with

When he came, Westover did not quite like his despatch of the halfbottle of California claret served each of

them with the Italian table d'hote. He did not like his having already seen the play he proposed; and he found

some difficulty in choosing a play which Jeff had not seen. It appeared then that he had been at the theatre

two or three times a week for the last month, and that it was almost as great a passion with him as with

Westover himself. He had become already a critic of acting, with a rough good sense of it, and a decided

opinion. He knew which actors he preferred, and which actresses, better still. It was some consolation for

Westover to find that he mostly took an admission ticket when he went to the theatre; but, though he could

not blame Jeff for showing his own fondness for it, he wished that he had not his fondness.

So far Jeff seemed to have spent very few of his evenings in Cambridge, and Westover thought it would be

well if he had some acquaintance there. He made favor for him with a friendly family, who asked him to

dinner. They did it to oblige Westover, against their own judgment and knowledge, for they said it was

always the same with Freshmen; a single act of hospitality finished the acquaintance. Jeff came, and he

behaved with as great indifference to the kindness meant him as if he were dining out every night; he excused

himself very early in the evening on the ground that he had to go into Boston, and he never paid his

dinnercall. After that Westover tried to consider his whole duty to him fulfilled, and not to trouble himself

further. Now and then, however, Jeff disappointed the expectation Westover had formed of him, by coming

to see him, and being apparently glad of the privilege. But he did not make the painter think that he was

growing in grace or wisdom, though he apparently felt an increasing confidence in his own knowledge of life.

Westover could only feel a painful interest tinged with amusement in his grotesque misconceptions of the

world where he had not yet begun to right himself. Jeff believed lurid things of the society wholly unknown

to him; to his gross credulity, Boston houses, which at the worst were the homes of a stiff and cold

exclusiveness, were the scenes of riot only less scandalous than the dissipation to which fashionable ladies

abandoned themselves at champagne suppers in the Back Bay hotels and on their secret visits to the Chinese

Westover tried to make him see how impossible his fallacies were; but he could perceive that Jeff thought

him either wilfully ignorant or helplessly innocent, and of far less authority than a barber who had the entree

of all these swell families as hairdresser, and who corroborated the witness of a hotel nightclerk (Jeff

would not give their names) to the depravity of the upper classes. He had to content himself with saying: "I

hope you will be ashamed some day of having believed such rot. But I suppose it's something you've got to

go through. You may take my word for it, though? that it isn't going to do you any good. It's going to do you

harm, and that's why I hate to have you think it, for your own sake. It can't hurt any one else."

What disgusted the painter most was that, with all his belief in the wickedness of the fine world, it was clear

that Jeff would have willingly been of it; and he divined that if he had any strong aspirations they were for

society and for social acceptance. He had fancied, when the fellow seemed to care so little for the studies of

the university, that he might come forward in its sports. Jeff gave more and more the effect of tremendous

strength in his peculiar physique, though there was always the disappointment of not finding him tall. He was

of the middle height, but he was hewn out and squared upward massively. He felt like stone to any accidental

contact, and the painter brought away a bruise from the mere brunt of his shoulders. He learned that Jeff was

a frequenter of the gymnasium, where his strength must have been known, but he could not make out that he

had any standing among the men who went in for athletics. If Jeff had even this, the sort of standing in

college which he failed of would easily have been won, too. But he had been falsely placed at the start, or

some quality of his nature neutralized other qualities that would have made him a leader in college, and he

remained one of the least forward men in it. Other jays won favor and liking, and ceased to be jays; Jeff

continued a jay. He was not chosen into any of the nicer societies; those that he joined when he thought they

Westover came into a knowledge of the facts through his casual and scarcely voluntary confidences, and he

pitied him somewhat while he blamed him a great deal more, without being able to help him at all.

It appeared to him that the fellow had gone wrong more through ignorance than perversity, and that it was a

stubbornness of spirit rather than a badness of heart that kept him from going right. He sometimes wondered

whether it was not more a baffled wish to be justified in his own esteem than anything else that made him

overvalue the things he missed. He knew how such an experience as that with Mrs. Marven rankles in the

heart of youth, and will not cease to smart till some triumph in kind brines it ease; but between the man of

thirty and the boy of twenty there is a gulf fixed, and he could not ask. He did not know that a college man

often goes wrong in his first year, out of no impulse that he can very clearly account for himself, and then

when he ceases to be merely of his type and becomes more of his character, he pulls up and goes right. He

did not know how much Jeff had been with a set that was fast without being fine. The boy had now and then

a book in his hand when he came; not always such a book as Westover could have wished, but still a book;

and to his occasional questions about how he was getting on with his college work, Jeff made brief answers,

Toward the end of his first year he sent to Westover one night from a stationhouse, where he had been

locked up for breaking a streetlamp in Boston. By his own showing he had not broken the lamp, or assisted,

except through his presence, at the misdeed of the tipsy students who had done it. His breath betrayed that he

had been drinking, too; but otherwise he seemed as sober as Westover himself, who did not know whether to

augur well or ill for him from the proofs he had given before of his ability to carry off a bottle of wine with a

perfectly level head. Jeff seemed to believe Westover a person of such influence that he could secure his

release at once, and he was abashed to find that he must pass the night in the cell, where he conferred with

In the police court, where his companions were fined, the next morning, he was discharged for want of

evidence against him; but the university authorities did not take the same view as the civil authorities. He was

He expected to find him at Lion's Head, where he went to pass the month of Augustin painting those

pictures of the mountain which had in some sort, almost in spite of him, become his specialty. But Mrs.

Durgin employed the first free moments after their meeting in explaining that Jeff had got a chance to work

his way to London on a cattlesteamer, and had been abroad the whole summer. He had written home that

the voyage had been glorious, with plenty to eat and little to do; and he had made favor with the captain for

his return by the same vessel in September. By other letters it seemed that he had spent the time mostly in

England; but he had crossed over into France for a fortnight, and had spent a week in Paris. His mother read

some passages from his letters aloud to show Westover how Jeff was keeping his eyes open. His accounts of

his travel were a mixture of crude sensations in the presence of famous scenes and objects of interest,

hardheaded observation of the facts of life, narrowminded misconception of conditions, and wholly

Mrs. Durgin seemed to feel that there was some excuse due for the relative quantity of the last. "He knows

that's what I'd care for the most; and Jeff a'n't one to forget his mother." As if the word reminded her, she

added, after a moment: "We sha'n't any of us soon forget what you done for Jeffthat time."

"You done what you could, and I know that you saw the thing in the right light, or you wouldn't 'a' tried to do

anything. Jeff told me every word about it. I know he was with a pretty harumscarum crowd. But it was a

lesson to him; and I wa'n't goin' to have him come back here, right away, and have folks talkin' about what

"Mm." Mrs. Durgin nodded. "And some dirty, sneakin' thing, here, wrote a letter to the paper and told a

passel o' lies about Jeff and all of us; and the paper printed Jeff's picture with it; I don't know how they got a

hold of it. So when he got that chance to go, I just said, 'Go.' You'll see he'll keep all straight enough after

"Old woman read you any of Jeff's letters?" Whitwell asked, when his chance for private conference with

Westover explained as favorably to Jeff as he could; the worst of the affair was the bad company he was in.

Well, where there's smoke there's some fire. Cou't discharged him and college suspended him. That's about

where it is? I guess he'll keep out o' harm's way next time. Read you what he said about them scenes of the

"Done it for me, I guess, much as anything. I was always talkin' it up with him. Jeff's kep' his eyes open,

Westover decided that Mrs. Durgin's prepotent behavior toward Mrs. Marven the summer before had not hurt

her materially, with the witnesses even. There were many new boarders, but most of those whom he had

already met were again at Lion's Head. They said there was no air like it, and no place so comfortable. If they

had sold their birthright for a mess of pottage, Westover had to confess that the pottage was very good.

Instead of the Irish woman at ten dollars a week who had hitherto been Mrs. Durgin's cook, under her

personal surveillance and direction, she had now a man cook, whom she boldly called a chef and paid eighty

dollars a month. He wore the white apron and white cap of his calling, but Westover heard him speak Yankee

through his nose to one of the stablemen as they exchanged hilarities across the space between the basement

and the barndoor. "Yes," Mrs. Durgin admitted, "he's an American; and he learnt his trade at one of the best

hotels in Portland. He's pretty headstrong, but I guess he does what he's toldin the end. The meanyous? Oh,

Franky Whitwell prints then. He's got an amateur printingoffice in the stableloft."

One morning toward the end of August, Whitwell, who was starting homeward, after leaving his ladies,

burdened with their wishes and charges for the morrow, met Westover coming up the hill with his

paintinggear in his hand. "Say!" he hailed him. "Why don't you come down to the house tonight? Jackson's

goin' to come, and, if you ha'n't seen him work the plantchette for a spell, you'll be surprised. There a'n't

What affected Westover first of all at the seance, and perhaps most of all, was the quality of the air in the

little house; it was close and stuffy, mixed with an odor of mould and an ancient smell of rats. The

kerosenelamp set in the centre of the table, where Jackson afterward placed his planchette, devoured the

little life that was left in it. At the gasps which Westover gave, with some despairing glances at the closed

windows, Whitwell said: "Hot? Well, I guess it is a little. But, you see, Jackson has got to be careful about the

night air; but I guess I can fix it for you." He went out into the ell, and Westover heard him raising a window.

He came back and asked, "That do? It 'll get around in here directly," and Westover had to profess relief.

Jackson came in presently with the little Canuck, whom Whitwell presented to Westover: "Know

The two were talking about a landslide which had taken place on the other side of the mountain; the news had

just come that they had found among the ruins the body of the farmhand who had been missing since the

Jackson put his planchette on the table, and sat down before it with a sigh; the Canuck remained standing, and

on foot he was scarcely a head higher than the seated Yankees. "Well," Jackson said, "I suppose he knows all

"Know anything!" Whitwell shouted. "Why, man, don't you believe he's as much alive as ever he was?"

"Not as I know other things. In fact, I don't know it," said Westover, and he was painfully aware of having

shocked his hearers by the agnosticism so common among men in towns that he had confessed it quite simply

and unconsciously. He perceived that faith in the soul and life everlasting was as quick as ever in the hills,

whatever grotesque or unwonted form it wore. Jackson sat with closed eyes and his head fallen back;

Whitwell stared at the painter, with open mouth; the little Canuck began to walk up and down impatiently;

"Proof? Oh Yes. There's testimony enough to carry conviction to the stubbornest mind on any other point.

But it's very strange about all that. It doesn't convince anybody but the witnesses. If a man tells me he's seen a

disembodied spirit, I can't believe him. I must see the disembodied spirit myself."

"If one came back from the dead, to tell us of a life beyond the grave, we should want the assurance that he'd

Whitwell laughed again, in the delight the philosophic mind finds even in the reasoning that hates it.

The Canuck felt perhaps the simpler joy that the average man has in any strange notion that he is able to

grasp. He stopped in his walk and said: "Yes, and if you was dead and went to heaven, and stayed so long

you smelt, like Lazarus, and you come back and tol' 'em what you saw, nobody goin' believe you."

"Well, I guess you're right there, Jombateeste," said Whitwell, with pleasure in the Canuck's point. After a

moment he suggested to Westover: "Then I s'pose, if you feel the way you do, you don't care much about

"Oh yes, I do," said the painter. "We never know when we may be upon the point of revelation. I wouldn't

Whether Whitwell felt an ironic slant in the words or not, he paused a moment before he said: "Want to start

Jackson brought to the floor the forefeet of his chair, which he had tilted from it in leaning back, and without

other answer put his hand on the planchette. It began to fly over the large sheet of paper spread upon the

The little Canuck, as if he had now no further concern in the matter, sat down in a corner and smoked

The little instrument seemed, in fact, trying to control itself. Its movements became less wild and large; the

zigzags began to shape themselves into something like characters. Jackson's wasted face gave no token of

interest; Whitwell laid half his gaunt length across the table in the endeavor to make out some meaning in

them; the Canuck, with his hands crossed on his stomach, smoked on, with the same gleam in his pipe and

"Let's try to make out what she says." Whitwell drew the sheets toward himself and Westover, who sat next

him. "You've got to look for the letters everywhere. Sometimes she'll give you fair and square writin', and

then again she'll slat the letters down every which way, and you've got to hunt 'em out for yourself. Here's a B

I've got. That begins along pretty early in the alphabet. Let's see what we can find next."

Whitwell exulted in an unmistakable K and N ; and he made sure of an I, and an E. The painter was not so

sure of an S. "Well, call it an S," said Whitwell. "And I guess I've got an O here, and an H. Hello! Here's an A

"Yes; I don't see that we're much better off than we were before," said Westover.

"Write 'em down in a row and see if we can't pick out some sense. I've had worse finds than this; no vowels at

He wrote the letters down, while Jackson leaned back against the wall, in patient quiet.

"Well, sir," said Whitwell, pushing the paper, where he had written the letters in a line, to Westover, "make

"Just what I done! But I wanted you to speak first. It's Broken Shaft. Jackson, she caught right onto what we

was talkin' about. This life," he turned to Westover, in solemn exegesis, "is a broken shaft when death comes.

It rests upon the earth, but you got to look for the top of it in the skies. That's the way I look at it. What do

Westover remained in a shameful minority. He said, meekly: "It suggests a beautiful hope."

"Feel that tinglin'?" asked. Whitwell, and Jackson made yes with silent lips. "After he's been workin' the

plantchette for a spell, and then leaves off, and she wants to say something more," Whitwell explained to

Westover, "he seems to feel a kind of tinglin' in his arm, as if it was asleep, and then he's got to tackle her

again. Writin' steady enough now, Jackson!" he cried, joyously. "Let's see." He leaned over and read,

"Thomas Jefferson" The planchette stopped, " My, I didn't go to do that," said Whitwell, apologetically.

The painter had to own his ignorance of all except the diction that the government is best which governs

least; but he was not in a position to deny that Jefferson had ever said anything about a broken shaft.

The planchette began to stir itself again. "She's goin' ahead !" cried Whitwell. He leaned over the table so as

to get every letter as it was formed. "D Yes! Death. Death is the Broken Shaft. Go on!" After a moment of

faltering the planchette formed another letter. It was a U, and it was followed by an R, and so on, till Durgin

"I can't seem to go on," Jackson whispered, and Westover could not resist the fear that suddenly rose among

them. But he made the first struggle against it. "This is nonsense. Or, if there's any sense in it, it means that

Jackson said, quietly: "He didn't mean to start home till tomorrow. And how could he send any message

"Easily!" cried Westover. "It's simply an instance of mental impression of telepathy, as they call it."

Westover could see that Jackson still doubted. "If you believe that a disembodied spirit can communicate

with you, why not an embodied spirit? If anything has happened to your brother's ship, his mind would be

Westover wanted to laugh; but they all heard voices without, which seemed to be coming nearer, and he

listened with the rest. He made out Frank Whitwell's voice, and his sister's; and then another voice, louder

and gayer, rose boisterously above them. Whitwell flung the door open and plunged out into the night. He

"Here, now," be shouted to Jackson, "you just let this feller and plantchette fight it out together!"

"What's the matter with plantchette ?" said Jeff, before he said to his brother, "Hello, Jackson!" and to the

Canuck, "Hello, Jombateeste!" He shook hands conventionally with them both, and then with the painter,

whom he greeted with greater interest. "Glad to see you here, Mr. Westover. Did I take you by surprise?" he

"No, sir," said Whitwell. "Didn't surprise us any, if you are a fortnight ahead of time," he added, with a wink

"Well, I took a notion I wouldn't wait for the cattleship, and I started back on a French boat. Thought I'd try

it. They live well. But I hoped I should astonish you a little, too. I might as well waited."

"Broken shaft? We didn't have any broken shaft. Plantchette's got mixed a little. Got the wrong ship."

"Then somebody's been makin' free with your name. Curious how them devils cut up oftentimes."

He explained, and Jeff laughed uproariously when he understood the whole case. "Plantchette's been havin'

Whitwell gave himself time for reflection. "No, sir, I don't look at it that way. I guess the wires got crossed

some way. If there's such a thing as the spirits o' the livin' influencin' plantchette, accordin' to Mr. Westover's

say, here, I don't see why it wa'n't. Jeff's being so near that got control of her and made her sign his name to

"Well, I'm glad to come back alive, anyway," said Jeff, with a joviality new to Westover. "I tell you, there

a'n't many places finer than old Lion's Head, after all. Don't you think so, Mr. Westover? I want to get the

daylight on it, but it does well by moonlight, even." He looked round at the tall girl, who had been lingering

to hear the talk of planchette; at the backward tilt he gave his head, to get her in range, she frowned as if she

felt his words a betrayal, and slipped out of the room; the boy had already gone, and was making himself

"There's a lot of folks here this summer, mother says," he appealed from the check he had got to Jackson.

"Well, it's a great business; and I've picked up a lot of hints over there. We're not so smart as we think we are.

"I want to know! Well, now them Alps, nowthey so much bigger 'n the White Hills, after all?"

"Well, I don't know about all of 'em," said Jeff. "There may be some that would compare with our hills, but I

should say that you could take Mount Washington up and set it in the lap of almost any one of the Alps I saw,

"I want to know!" said Whitwell again. His tone expressed disappointment, but impartiality; he would do

justice to foreign superiority if he must. "And about the ocean. What about waves runnin? mountains high?"

"Well, we didn't have it very rough. But I don't believe I saw any waves much higher than Lion's Head." Jeff

"Oh, it satisfies me. Truth always does. But, now, about London. You didn't seem to say so much about

London in your letters, now. Is it so big as they let on? Bigthat is, to the naked eye, as you may say?"

"There a'n't any one place where you can get a complete bird'seye view of it," said Jeff, " and twothirds of

it would be hid in smoke, anyway. You've got to think of a place that would take in the whole population of

New England, outside of Massachusetts, and not feel as if it had more than a comfortable meal."

"I'll tell you. When you've landed and crossed up from Liverpool, and struck London, you feel as if you'd

"That's right!" crowed Whitwell. "That's the way I thought it was. Growin' any?"

"Good!" said Whitwell. "That suits me. And about Paris, now. Paris strike you the same way?"

"It don't need to," said Jeff. "That's a place where I'd like to live. Everybody's at home there. It's a man's

house and his front yard, and I tell you they keep it clean. Paris is washed down every morning; scrubbed and

mopped and rubbed dry. You couldn't find any more dirt than you could in mother's kitchen after she's hung

"And beautiful! You don't know what a goodlooking town is till you strike Paris. And they're proud of it,

too. Every man acts as if he owned it. They've had the statue of Alsace in that Place de la Concorde of yours,

Mr. Whitwell, where they had the guillotine all draped in black ever since the war with Germany; and they

The little man roused himself from the muse in which he was listening and smoking. "Me, I'm Frantsh," he

"Oh," answered Jombateeste, impatiently, "I thought you mean the Hunited State."

"Good for Jombateeste," said Jeff. "Stand up for Canada every time, John. It's the livest country, in the world

Whitwell could not brook a diversion from the high and serious inquiry they had entered upon. "It must have

made this country look pretty slim when you got back. How'd New York look, after Paris?"

"Like a pigpen," said Jeff. He left his chair and walked round the table toward a door opening into the

adjoining room. For the first time Westover noticed a figure in white seated there, and apparently rapt in the

talk which had been going on. At the approach of Jeff, and before he could have made himself seen at the

doorway, a tremor seemed to pass over the figure; it fluttered to its feet, and then it vanished into the farther

dark of the room. When Jeff disappeared within, there was a sound of rustling skirts and skurrying feet and

the crash of a closing door, and then the free rise of laughing voices without. After a discreet interval,

Westover said: "Mr. Whitwell, I must say goodnight. I've got another day's work before me. It's been a most

"You must try it again," said Whitwell, hospitably. "We ha'n't got to the bottom of that broken shaft yet.

You'll see 't plantchette 'll have something more to say about it: Heigh, Jackson?" He rose to receive

As the painter climbed the hill to the hotel he saw two figures on the road below; the one in white drapery

looked severed by a dark line slanting across it at the waist. In the country, he knew, such an appearance

might mark the earliest stages of lovemaking, or mere youthful tenderness, in which there was nothing more

implied or expected. But whatever the fact was, Westover felt a vague distaste for it, which, as it related itself

to a more serious possibility, deepened to something like pain. It was probable that it should come to this

between those two, but Westover rebelled against the event with a sense of its unfitness for which he could

not give himself any valid reason; and in the end he accused himself of being a fool.

Two ladies sat on the veranda of the hotel and watched a cloudwreath trying to lift itself from the summit of

Lion's Head. In the effort it thinned away to transparency in places; in others, it tore its frail texture asunder

and let parts of the mountain show through; then the fragments knitted themselves loosely together, and the

The ladies were older and younger, and apparently mother and daughter. The mother had kept her youth in

face and figure so admirably that in another light she would have looked scarcely the elder. It was the candor

of the morning which confessed the fine vertical lines running up and down to her lips, only a shade paler

than the girl's, and that showed her hair a trifle thinner in its coppery brown, her blue eyes a little dimmer.

They were both very graceful, and they had soft, caressing voices; they now began to talk very politely to

each other, as if they were strangers, or as if strangers were by. They talked of the landscape, and of the

strange cloud effect before them. They said that they supposed they should see the Lion's Head when the

cloud lifted, and they were both sure they had never been quite so near a cloud before. They agreed that this

was because in Switzerland the mountains were so much higher and farther off. Then the daughter said,

without changing the direction of her eyes or the tone of her voice, "The gentleman who came over from the

station with us last night," and the mother was aware of Jeff Durgin advancing toward the corner of the

"I hope you have got rested," he said, with the jovial bluntness which was characteristic of him with women.

"Oh, yes indeed," said the elder lady. Jeff had spoken to her, but had looked chiefly at the younger. "I slept

beautifully. So quiet here, and with this delicious air! Have you just tasted it?"

"No; I've been up ever since daylight, driving round," said Jeff. "I'm glad you like the air," he said, after a

certain hesitation. "We always want to have people do that at Lion's Head. There's no air like it, though

"Yes; we own the air herethis part of it." Jeff smiled easily down at the lady's puzzled face.

"Son of the hotel, yes," said Jeff, with increasing ease. The lady continued her question in a look, and he went

on: "I've been scouring the country for butter and eggs this morning. We shall get all our supplies from

"How very interesting!" said the lady. "You must have a great many queer adventures," she suggested in a

"Well, nothing's queer to me in the hill country. But you see some characters here." He nodded over his

shoulder to where Whitwell stood by the flagstaff, waiting the morning impulse of the ladies. "There's one

The lady put up a lorgnette and inspected Whitwell. "What are those strange things he has got in his

"The flowers and the fungi of the season," said Jeff. "He takes parties of the ladies walking, and that

"Yes," said Jeff. "You ought to hear him talk. I'll introduce him to you after breakfast, if you like."

"Oh, we should only be too happy," said the mother, and her daughter, from her inflection, knew that she

But Jeff did not. "Mr. Whitwell !" he called out, and Whitwell came across the grass to the edge of the

Whitwell took their slim hands successively into his broad, flat palm, and made Mrs. Vostrand repeat her

name to him. "Strangers at Lion's Head, I presume?" Mrs. Vostrand owned as much; and he added: "Well, I

guess you won't find a much sightlier place anywhere; though, accordin' to Jeff's say, here, they've got bigger

"Why, yes," said Mrs. Vostrand, with a little mouth of deprecation. "In fact, we've just come home. We've

"That so?" returned Whitwell, in humorous toleration. "Glad to get back, I presume?"

"Oh yesyes," said Mrs. Vostrand, in a sort of willowy concession, as if the character before her were not to

"Well, it 'll do you good here," said Whitwell. "'N' the young lady, too. A few tramps over these hills 'll make

you look like another woman." He added, as if he had perhaps made his remarks too personal to the girl,

"Oh yes," the mother assented, fervently. " We shall count upon your showing us all theirmysteries."

Whitwell looked pleased. "I'll do my bestwhenever you're ready." He went on: "Why, Jeff, here, has just got

back, too. Jeff, what was the name of that French boat you said you crossed on? I want to see if I can't make

out what plantchette meant by that broken shaft. She must have meant something, and if I could find out the

name of the ship Tell the ladies about it?" Jeff laughed, with a shake of the head, and Whitwell continued,

"Why, it was like this," and he possessed the ladies of a fact which they professed to find extremely

interesting. At the end of their polite expressions he asked Jeff again: "What did you say the name was?"

"Why, we came on the Aquitaine!" said Mrs. Vostrand, with a smile for Jeff. "But how did we happen not to

"Oh, I came secondcabin," said Jeff. "I worked my way over on a cattle ship to London, and, when I

decided not to work my way back, I found I hadn't enough money for a firstcabin passage. I was in a hurry

to get back in time to get settled at Harvard, and so I came secondcabin. It wasn't bad. I used to see you

"How veryamusing!" said Mrs. Vostrand. "What a small world it is!" With these words she fell into a

vagary; her daughter recalled her from it with a slight movement. "Breakfast? How impatient you are,

Genevieve! Well!" She smiled the sweetest parting to Whitwell, and suffered herself to be led away by Jeff.

"And you're at Harvard? I'm so interested! My own boy will be going there soon."

"Well, there's no place like Harvard," said Jeff. "I'm in my Sophomore year now."

"Oh, a Sophomore! Fancy!" cried Mrs. Vostrand, as if nothing could give her more pleasure. "My son is

"No, I prepared at Lovewell Academy, over here." Jeff nodded in a southerly direction.

"Oh, indeed!" said Mrs. Vostrand, as if she knew where Lovewell was, and instantly recognized the name of

They had reached the dining room, and Jeff pushed the screendoor open with one hand, and followed the

ladies in. He had the effect of welcoming them like invited guests; he placed the ladies himself at a window,

where he said Mrs. Vostrand would be out of the draughts, and they could have a good view of Lion's Head.

He leaned over between them, when they were seated, to get sight of the mountain, and, "There!" he said.

"That cloud's gone at last." Then, as if it would be modester in the proprietor of the view to leave them to

their flattering raptures in it, he moved away and stood talking a moment with Cynthia Whitwell near the

door of the servingroom. He talked gayly, with many tosses of the head and turns about, while she listened

"They all have the same look, a good deal," said the girl, glancing over the room where the waitresses stood

ranged against the wall with their hands folded at their waists. "They have better faces than figures, but she is

beautiful every way. Do you suppose they are all schoolteachers? They look intellectual. Or is it their

"I don't know," said the mother. "They used to be; but things change here so rapidly it may all be different.

"I think it's charming here," said the younger lady, evasively. "Everything is so exquisitely clean. And the

"Perhaps it won't take long. I could fancy that girl knowing about everything. Don't you like her looks?"

"What say?" Their smiling waitress came forward from the wall where she was leaning, as if she thought they

"I guess she knows what to dooo," the waitress chanted. " We think she's about riight." She smiled

tolerantly upon the misgiving of the stranger, if it was that, and then retreated when the mother and daughter

They had praised the mountain with the cloud off, to Jeff, very politely, and now the mother said, a little

more intimately, but still with the deference of a society acquaintance: "He seems very gentlemanly, and I am

"Yes, I suppose it must be. But you will get used to it if we remain in the country. Do you think you will

"Yes, it's different. He is very handsome, in a certain way." The daughter said nothing, and the mother added:

"I wonder if he was trying to conceal that he had come secondcabin, and was not going to let us know that

"No. But it was very odd, his not mentioning it. And his going out on a cattlesteamer?" the mother observed.

"Oh, but that's very chic, I've heard," the daughter replied. "I've heard that the young men like it and think it a

Westover met the ladies coming out of the diningroom as he went in rather late to breakfast; he had been

making a study of Lion's Head in the morning light after the cloud lifted from it. He was always doing Lion's

Heads, it seemed to him; but he loved the mountain, and he was always finding something new in it.

He was now seeing it inwardly with so exclusive a vision that he had no eyes for these extremely pretty

women till they were out of sight. Then he remembered noticing them, and started with a sense of

recognition, which he verified by the hotel register when he had finished his meal. It was, in fact, Mrs. James

W. Vostrand, and it was Miss Vostrand, whom Westover had know ten years before in Italy. Mrs. Vostrand

had then lately come abroad for the education of her children, and was pausing in doubt at Florence whether

she should educate them in Germany or Switzerland. Her husband had apparently abandoned this question to

her, and he did not contribute his presence to her moral support during her struggle with a problem which

Westover remembered as having a tendency to solution in the direction of a permanent stay in Florence.

In those days he liked Mrs. Vostrand very much, and at twenty he considered her at thirty distinctly

middleaged. For one winter she had a friendly little salon, which was the most attractive place in Florence to

him, then a cub painter sufficiently unlicked. He was aware of her children being a good deal in the salon: a

girl of eight, who was like her mother, and quite a savage little boy of five, who may have been like his

father. If he was, and the absent Mr. Vostrand had the same habit of sulking and kicking at people's shins,

Westover could partly understand why Mrs. Vostrand had come to Europe for the education of her children.

It all came vividly back to him, while he went about looking for Mrs. Vostrand and her daughter on the

verandas and in the parlors. But he did not find them, and he was going to send his name to their rooms when

he came upon Jeff Durgin figuring about the office in a fresh London conception of an outing costume.

"Like it? Well, I knew you'd understand what it meant. Mother thinks it's a little too rowdylooking. Her idea

is black broadcloth frockcoat and doeskin trousers for a gentleman, you know." He laughed with a young

joyousness, and then became serious. "Couple of ladies here, somewhere, I'd like to introduce you to. Came

over with me from the depot last night. Very nice people, and I'd like to make it pleasant for themget up

somethinggo somewhereand when you see their style you can judge what it had better be. Mrs.

"Thank you," said Westover. "I think I know them already at least one of them. I used to go to Mrs.

"That so? Well, fact is, I crossed with them; but I came secondcabin, because I'd spent all my money, and I

didn't get acquainted with them on the ship, but we met in the train coming up last night. Said they had heard

of Lion's Head on the other side from friends. But it was quite a coincidence, don't you think? I'd like to have

them see what this neighborhood really is; and I wish, Mr. Westover, you'd find out, if you can, what they'd

like. If they're for walking, we could get Whitwell to personally conduct a party, and if they're for driving, I'd

"I don't know whether I'd better not leave the whole thing to you, Jeff," Westover said, after a moment's

reflection. "I don't see exactly how I could bring the question into a first interview."

"Well, perhaps it would be rather rushing it. But, if I get up something, you'll come, Mr. Westover?"

A halfhour later he was passing the door of the old parlor which Mrs. Durgin still kept for hers, on his way

up to his room, when a sound of angry voices came out to him. Then the voice of Mrs. Durgin defined itself

in the words: "I'm not goin' to have to ask any more folks for their rooms on your account, Jeff DurginMr.

Westover! Mr. Westover, is that you?" her voice broke off to call after him as he hurried by, "Won't you

The painter found him sitting on the old haircloth sofa, with his stick between his hands and knees,

confronting his mother, who was rocking excitedly to and fro in the old haircloth easychair.

"Crazy!" cried Jeff, laughing and frowning at the same time. "What's crazy in wanting to go off on a drive

"The Vostrands? Why, yes. I knew Mrs. Vostrand in Italy a good many years ago, and I've just been calling

"Why, it's just this. Jeff, here, wants to make a picnic for them, or something, and I can't see the sense of it.

You remember what happened at that other picnic, with that Mrs. Marven"Jeff tapped the floor with his

stick impatiently, and Westover felt sorry for him"and I don't want it to happen again, and I've told Jeff so.

I presume he thinks it 'll set him right with them, if they're thinkin' demeaning of him because he came over

Jeff set his teeth and compressed his lips to bear as best he could, the giveaway which his mother could not

"They're not the kind of people to take such a thing shabbily," said Westover. "They didn't happen to mention

it, but Mrs. Vostrand must have got used to seeing young fellows in straits of all kinds during her life abroad.

I know that I sometimes made the cup of tea and biscuit she used to give me in Florence do duty for a dinner,

His mother said: "Well, then, that's all right, and Jeff needn't do anything for them on that account. And I've

made up my mind about one thing: whatever the hotel does has got to be done for the whole hotel. It can't

pick and choose amongst the guests." Westover liked so little the part of old family friend which he seemed,

whether he liked it or not, to bear with the Durgins, that he would gladly have got away now, but Mrs. Durgin

Jeff spared him the pain of a response. "Very well," he said to his mother; "I'm not the hotel, and you never

Jeff rose. "I might as well go on down to Cambridge, and get to work on my conditions."

"Just as you please about that," said Mrs. Durgin, with the same impassioned quiet that showed in her son's

handsome face and made it one angry red to his yellow hair. "We've got along without you so far, this

summer, and I guess we can the rest of the time. And the sooner you work off your conditions the better, I

The next morning Jeff came to take leave of him, where Westover had pitched his easel and campstool on

"Why, are you really going?" he asked. "I was in hopes it might have blown over."

"No, things don't blow over so easy with mother," said Jeff, with an embarrassed laugh, but no resentment.

"Oh, I guess so," said Jeff, pulling up a long blade of grass and taking it between his teeth. "Anyway, it

comes to the same thing as far as I'm concerned. It's for her to say what shall be done and what sha'n't be

done in her own house, even if it is a hotel. That's what I shall do in mine. We're used to these little

differences; but we talk it out, and that's the end of it. I shouldn't really go, though, if I didn't think I ought to

get in some work on those conditions before the thing begins regularly. I should have liked to help here a

little, for I've had a good time and I ought to be willing to pay for it. But she's in good hands. Jackson's

The easy security of tone with which Jeff pronounced the name vexed Westover. "I suppose your mother

would hardly know how to do without her, even if you were at home," he said, dryly.

"Well, that's a fact," Jeff assented, with a laugh for the hit. "And Jackson thinks the world of her. I believe he

trusts her judgment more than he does mother's about the hotel. Well, I must be going. You don't know where

"No, I don't," said Westover. He could not help a sort of blind resentment in the situation. If he could not feel

that Jeff was the best that could be for Cynthia, he had certainly no reason to regret that his thoughts could be

so lightly turned from her. But the fact anomalously incensed him as a slight to the girl, who might have been

still more sacrificed by Jeff's constancy. He forced himself to add: "I fancy Mrs. Vostrand doesn't know

"I wish I didn't know where I was going to be," said Jeff. "Well, good bye, Mr. Westover. I'll see you in

"Oh, goodbye." The painter freed himself from his brush and palette for a parting handshake, reluctantly.

Jeff plunged down the hill, waving a final adieu from the corner of the hotel before he vanished round it.

Mrs. Vostrand and her daughter were at breakfast when Westover came in after the early light had been gone

some time. They entreated him to join them at their table, and the mother said: "I suppose you were up soon

enough to see young Mr. Durgin off. Isn't it too bad he has to go back to college when it's so pleasant in the

"Not bad for him," said Westover. "He's a young man who can stand a great deal of hard work." Partly

because he was a little tired of Jeff, and partly because he was embarrassed in their presence by the reason of

Mrs. Vostrand was very willing to talk of her past, even apart from his, and she told him of her sojourn in

Europe since her daughter had left school. They spent their winters in Italy and their summers in Switzerland,

where it seemed her son was still at his studies in Lausanne. She wished him to go to Harvard, she said, and

she supposed he would have to finish his preparation at one of the American schools; but she had left the

This seemed a strange event after twelve years' stay in Europe for the education of her children, but Westover

did not feel authorized to make any comment upon it. He fell rather to thinking how very pleasant both

mother and daughter were, and to wondering how much wisdom they had between them. He reflected that

men had very little wisdom, as far as he knew them, and he questioned whether, after all, the main difference

between men and women might not be that women talked their follies and men acted theirs. Probably Mrs.

Vostrand, with all her babble, had done fewer foolish things than her husband, but here Westover felt his

judgment disabled by the fact that he had never met her husband; and his mind began to wander to a question

of her daughter, whom he had there before him. He found himself bent upon knowing more of the girl, and

trying to eliminate her mother from the talk, or, at least, to make Genevieve lead in it. But apparently she was

not one of the natures that like to lead; at any rate, she remained discreetly in abeyance, and Westover fancied

she even respected her mother's opinions and ideas. He thought this very well for both of them, whether it

was the effect of Mrs. Vostrand's merit or Miss Vostrand's training. They seemed both of one exquisite

gentleness, and of one sweet manner, which was rather elaborate and formal in expression. They deferred to

each other as politely as they deferred to him, but, if anything, the daughter deferred most.

The Vostrands did not stay long at Lion's Head. Before the week was out Mrs. Vostrand had a letter

summoning them to meet her husband at Montreal, where that mysterious man, who never came into the

range of Westover's vision, somehow, was kept by business from joining them in the mountains.

Early in October the painter received Mrs. Vostrand's card at his studio in Boston, and learned from the

scribble which covered it that she was with her daughter at the Hotel Vendome. He went at once to see them

there, and was met, almost before the greetings were past, with a prayer for his opinion.

"Favorable? Oh yes; of course. It's simply this. When I sent you my card, we were merely birds of passage,

"Well, it doesn't matter. We were walking down the street, here, this morning, and we saw the sign of an

apartment to let, in a window, and we thought, just for amusement, we would go in and look at it."

"No, not quite so rapid as that. But it was lovely; in such a pretty 'hotel garni', and so exquisitely furnished!

We didn't really think of staying in Boston; we'd quite made up our minds on New York; but this apartment is

"Why not yield, then?" said Westover. "That's the easiest way with a temptation. Confess, now, that you've

"And may I come in when I'm hungry, just as I used to do in Florence, and will you stay me with flagons in

"I will try my best, on condition that you'll make any and every possible use of me. Mrs. Vostrand, I can't tell

you how very glad I am you're going to stay," said the painter, with a fervor that made her impulsively put

out her hand to him. He kept it while he could add, "I don't forget I can never forgethow good you were

to me in those days," and at that she gave his hand a quick pressure. "If I can do anything at all for you, you

will let me, won't you. I'm afraid you'll be so well provided for that there won't be anything. Ask them to

"Yes, I will," Mrs. Vostrand promised. "And may we come to your studio to implore your protection?"

"The sooner the better." Westover got himself away with a very sweet friendship in his heart for this rather

anomalous lady, who, more than half her daughter's life, had lived away from her daughter's father, upon

apparently perfectly good terms with him, and so discreetly and selfrespectfully that no breath of reproach

had touched her. Until now, however, her position had not really concerned Westover, and it would not have

concerned him now, if it had not been for a design that formed itself in his mind as soon as he knew that Mrs.

Vostrand meant to pass the winter in Boston. He felt at once that he could not do things by halves for a

woman who had once done them for him by wholes and something over, and he had instantly decided that he

must not only be very pleasant to her himself, but he must get his friends to be pleasant, too. His friends were

some of the nicest people in Boston; nice in both the personal and the social sense; he knew they would not

hesitate to sacrifice themselves for him in a good cause, and that made him all the more anxious that the

Since his last return from Paris he had been rather a fad as a teacher, and his class had been kept quite strictly

to the ladies who got it up and to such as they chose to let enter it. These were not all chosen for wealth or

family; there were some whose gifts gave the class distinction, and the ladies were glad to have them. It

would be easy to explain Mrs. Vostrand to these, but the others might be more difficult; they might have their

anxieties, and Westover meant to ask the leader of the class to help him receive at the studio tea he had at

He found himself drawing a very deep and long breath before he began to mount the many stairs to his studio,

and wishing either that Mrs. Vostrand had not decided to spend the winter in Boston, or else that he were of a

slacker conscience and could wear his gratitude more lightly. But there was some relief in thinking that he

could do nothing for a month yet. He gained a degree of courage by telling the ladies, when he went to find

them in their new apartment, that he should want them to meet a few of his friends at tea as soon as people

began to get back to town; and he made the most of their instant joy in accepting his invitation.

His pleasure was somehow dashed a little, before he left them, by the announcement of Jeff Durgin's name.

"I felt bound to send him my card," said Mrs. Vostrand, while Jeff was following his up in the elevator. "He

was so very kind to us the day we arrived at Zion's Head; and I didn't know but he might be feeling a little

"How like you, Mrs. Vostrand !" cried Westover, and he was now distinctly glad he had not tried to sneak out

of doing something for her. "Your kindness won't be worse wasted on Durgin than it was on me, in the old

days, when I supposed I had taken a secondcabin passage for the voyage of life. There's a great deal of good

in him; I don't mean to say he got through his Freshman year without trouble with the college authorities, but

Later, the ladies brought Jeff with them when they came to Westover's studio, and the painter perceived that

they were very good friends, as if they must have met several times since he had seen them together. He

interested himself in the growing correctness of Jeff's personal effect. During his Freshman year, while the

rigor of the unwritten Harvard law yet forbade him a silk hat or a cane, he had kept something of the boy, if

not the country boy. Westover had noted that he had always rather a taste for clothes, but in this first year he

did not get beyond a derbyhat and a sackcoat, varied toward the end by a cutaway. In the outing dress he

wore at home he was always effective, but there was something in Jeff's figure which did not lend itself to

more formal fashion; something of herculean proportion which would have marked him of a classic beauty

perhaps if he had not been in clothes at all, or of a yeomanly vigor and force if he had been clad for work, but

which seemed to threaten the more worldly conceptions of the tailor with danger. It was as if he were about to

burst out of his clothes, not because he wore them tight, but because there was somehow more of the man

than the citizen in him; something native, primitive, something that Westover could not find quite a word for,

characterized him physically and spiritually. When he came into the studio after these delicate ladies, the

robust Jeff Durgin wore a long frockcoat, with a flower in his buttonhole, and in his left hand he carried a

silk hat turned over his forearm as he must have noticed people whom he thought stylish carrying their hats.

He had on darkgray trousers and sharppointed enamelled leather shoes; and Westover grotesquely

reflected that he was dressed, as he stood, to lead Genevieve Vostrand to the altar.

Westover saw at once that when he made his studio tea for the Vostrands he must ask Jeff; it would be cruel,

and for several reasons impossible, not to do so, and he really did not see why he should not. Mrs. Vostrand

was taking him on the right ground, as a Harvard student, and nobody need take him on any other. Possibly

people would ask him to teas at their own houses, from Westover's studio, but he could not feel that he was

concerned in that. Society is interested in a man's future, not his past, as it is interested in a woman's past, not

But when he gave his tea it went off wonderfully well in every way, perhaps because it was one of the first

teas of the fall. It brought people together in their autumnal freshness before the winter had begun to wither

their resolutions to be amiable to one another, to dull their wits, to stale their stories, or to give so wide a

Westover had thought it best to be frank with the leading lady of his class, when she said she should be

delighted to receive for him, and would provide suitable young ladies to pour: a brunette for the tea, and a

blonde for the chocolate. She took his scrupulosity very lightly when he spoke of Mrs. Vostrand's educational

sojourn in Europe; she laughed and said she knew the type, and the situation was one of the most obvious

He protested in vain that Mrs. Vostrand was not the type; she laughed again, and said, Oh, types were never

typical. But she was hospitably gracious both to her and to Miss Genevieve; she would not allow that the

mother was not the type when Westover challenged her experience, but she said they were charming, and

made haste to get rid of the question with the vivid demand: "But who was your young friend who ought to

Westover by this time disdained palliation. He said that Jeff was the son of the landlady at Lion's Head

Mountain, which he had painted so much, and he was now in his second year at Harvard, where he was going

to make a lawyer of himself; and this interested the lady. She asked if he had talent, and a number of other

things about him and about his mother; and Westover permitted himself to be rather graphic in telling of his

After all, it was rather a simplehearted thing of Westover to have either hoped or feared very much for the

Vostrands. Society, in the sense of good society, can always take care of itself, and does so perfectly. In the

case of Mrs. Vostrand some ladies who liked Westover and wished to be civil to him asked her and her

daughter to other afternoon teas, shook hands with them at their coming, and said, when they went, they were

sorry they must be going so soon. In the crowds people recognized them now and then, both of those who had

met them at Westover's studio, and of those who had met them at Florence and Lausanne. But if these were

merely people of fashion they were readily, rid of the Vostrands, whom the dullest among them quickly

perceived not to be of their own sort, somehow. Many of the ladies of Westover's class made Genevieve

promise to let them paint her; and her beauty and her grace availed for several large dances at the houses of

more daring spirits, where the daughters made a duty of getting partners for her, and discharged it

conscientiously. But there never was an approach to more intimate hospitalities, and toward the end of

February, when good society in Boston goes southward to indulge a Lenten grief at Old Point Comfort,

Genevieve had so many vacant afternoons and evenings at her disposal that she could not have truthfully

pleaded a previous engagement to the invitations Jeff Durgin made her. They were chiefly for the theatre, and

Westover saw him with her and her mother at different plays; he wondered how Jeff had caught on to the

Jeff's introductions at Westover's tea had not been many, and they had not availed him at all. He had been

asked to no Boston houses, and when other students, whom he knew, were going in to dances, the whole

winter he was socially as quiet, but for the Vostrands, as at the Midyear Examinations. Westover could not

resent the neglect of society in his case, and he could not find that he quite regretted it; but he thought it

characteristically nice of Mrs. Vostrand to make as much of the friendless fellow as she fitly could. He had no

doubt but her tact would be equal to his management in every way, and that she could easily see to it that he

One day, after the east wind had ceased to blow the breath of the ice fields of Labrador against the New

England coast, and the buds on the trees along the mall between the lawns of the avenue were venturing forth

in a hardy experiment of the Boston May, Mrs. Vostrand asked Westover if she had told him that Mr.

Vostrand was actually coming on to Boston. He rejoiced with her in this prospect, and he reciprocated the

A fortnight later, when the leaves had so far inured themselves to the weather as to have fully expanded, she

announced another letter from Mr. Vostrand, saying that, after all, he should not be able to come to Boston,

"Why, yes! Didn't you know we were going to sail in June? I thought I had told you!"

"Why, yes. We must go out to poor Checco, now; Mr. Vostrand insists upon that. If ever we are a united

family again, Mr. Westoverif Mr. Vostrand can arrange his business, when Checco is ready to enter

Harvard I mean to take a house in Boston. I'm sure I should be contented to live nowhere else in America.

The place has quite bewitched medear old, sober, charming Boston! I'm sure I should like to live here all

the rest of my life. But why in the world do people go out of town so early? Those houses over there have

They were sitting at Mrs. Vostrand's window looking out on the avenue, where the pale globular electrics

were swimming like jellyfish in the clear evening air, and above the ranks of low trees the houses on the

Westover answered: "Some go because they have such pleasant houses at the shore, and some because they

"To dodge their taxes?" she repeated, and he had to explain how if people were in their countryhouses

before the 1st of May they would not have to pay the high personal tax of the city; and she said that she

would write that to Mr. Vostrand; it would be another point in favor of Boston. Women, she declared, would

never have thought of such a thing; she denounced them as culpably ignorant of so many matters that

concerned them, especially legal matters. "And you think," she asked, "that Mr. Durgin will be a good

Westover thought it rather a shortcut to Jeff from the things they had been talking of, but if she wished to

speak of him he had no reason to oppose her wish. "I've heard it's all changed a good deal. There are still

distinguished lawyers, and lawyers who get on, but they don't distinguish themselves in the old way so much,

"Oh, I don't know," said Westover. "I think he has a good head. He can do what he likes within certain limits,

and the limits are not all on the side I used to fancy. He baffles me. But of late I fancy you've seen rather

"I have urged him to go more to you. But," said Mrs. Vostrand, with a burst of frankness, "he thinks you don't

"I see what you mean," said Mrs. Vostrand, "and I'm glad you've been so frank with me. I've been so

The question seemed a bit of indirection to Westover. But he answered directly enough. "He's rather old for a

"It's about Genevieve. Her father is so opposed to her making a foreign marriage. It seems to be his one great

dread. And, of course, she's very much exposed to it, living abroad so much with me, and I feel doubly bound

on that account to respect her father's opinions, or even prejudices. Before we left Florencein fact, last

winterthere was a most delightful young officer wished to marry her. I don't know that she cared anything

for him, though he was everything that I could have wished: handsome, brilliant, accomplished, good family;

everything but rich, and that was what Mr. Vostrand objected to; or, rather, he objected to putting up, as he

called it, the sum that Captain Grassi would have had to deposit with the government before he was allowed

to marry. You know how it is with the poor fellows in the army, there; I don't understand the process exactly,

but the sum is something like sixty thousand francs, I believe; and poor Gigi hadn't it: I always called him

Gigi, but his name is Count Luigi de' Popolani Grassi; and he is descended from one of the old republican

families of Florence. He is so nice! Mr. Vostrand was opposed to him from the beginning, and as soon as he

heard of the sixty thousand francs, he utterly refused. He called it buying a soninlaw, but I don't see why

he need have looked at it in that light. However, it was broken off, and we left Florencemore for poor

Gigi's sake than for Genevieve's, I must say. He was quite heart broken; I pitied him."

Her voice had a tender fall in the closing words, and Westover could fancy how sweet she would make her

compassion to the young man. She began several sentences aimlessly, and he suggested, to supply the broken

thread of her discourse rather than to offer consolation, while her eyes seemed to wander with her mind, and

ranged the avenue up and down: "Those foreign marriages are not always successful."

"No, they are not," she assented. "But don't you think they're better with Italians than with Germans, for

"I don't suppose the Italians expect their wives to black their boots, but I've heard that they beat them,

"In exaggerated cases, perhaps they do," Mrs. Vostrand admitted. "And, of course," she added, thoughtfully,

Westover wondered how she really regarded her own marriage, but she never betrayed any consciousness of

A young couple came strolling down the avenue who to Westover's artistic eye first typified grace and

strength, and then to his more personal perception identified themselves as Genevieve Vostrand and Jeff

They faltered before one of the benches beside the mall, and he seemed to be begging her to sit down. She

cast her eyes round till they must have caught the window of her mother's apartment; then, as if she felt safe

under it, she sank into the seat and Jeff put himself beside her. It was quite too early yet for the simple lovers

who publicly notify their happiness by the embraces and handclasps everywhere evident in our parks and

gardens; and a Boston pair of social tradition would not have dreamed of sitting on a bench in

Commonwealth Avenue at any hour. But two such aliens as Jeff and Miss Vostrand might very well do so;

Mrs. Vostrand and he watched them awhile, in talk that straggled away from them, and became more and

more distraught in view of them. Jeff leaned forward, and drew on the ground with the point of his stick;

Genevieve held her head motionless at a pensive droop. It was only their backs that Westover could see, and

he could not, of course, make out a syllable of what was effectively their silence; but all the same he began to

feel as if he were peeping and eavesdropping. Mrs. Vostrand seemed not to share his feeling, and there was

no reason why he should have it if she had not. He offered to go, but she said, No, no; he must not think of it

till Genevieve came in; and she added some banalities about her always scolding when she had missed one of

She did not seem to hear him, and he could see that she was watching the young people intently. Jeff had

turned his face up toward Genevieve, without lifting his person, and was saying something she suddenly

shrank back from. She made a start as if to rise, but he put out his hand in front of her, beseechingly or

compellingly, and she sank down again. But she slowly shook her head at what he was saying, and turned her

face toward him so that it gave her profile to the spectators. In that light and at that distance it was impossible

to do more than fancy anything fateful in the words which she seemed to be uttering; but Westover chose to

fancy this. Jeff waited a moment in apparent silence, after she had spoken. He sat erect and faced her, and this

gave his profile, too. He must have spoken, for she shook her head again; and then, at other words from him,

nodded assentingly. Then she listened motionlessly while he poured a rapid stream of visible but inaudible

words. He put out his hand, as if to take hers, but she put it behind her; Westover could see it white there

Jeff went on more vehemently, but she remained steadfast, slowly shaking her head. When he ended she

spoke, and with something of his own energy; he made a gesture of submission, and when she rose he rose,

too. She stood a moment, and with a gentle and almost entreating movement she put out her hand to him. He

stood looking down, with both his hands resting on the top of his stick, as if ignoring her proffer. Then he

suddenly caught her hand, held it a moment; dropped it, and walked quickly away without looking back.

"Oh, must, you go?" Mrs. Vostrand said to Westover. He found that he had probably risen in sympathy with

Jeff's action. He was not aware of an intention of going, but he thought he had better not correct Mrs.

He hurried out to avoid meeting Genevieve. He passed her, on the public stairs of the house, but he saw that

Late that night he was startled by steps that seemed to be seeking their way up the stairs to his landing, and

"Yes, come in," said Westover, with no great relish, setting his door open, and then holding onto it a moment,

His reluctance was lost upon Jeff, who said, unconscious of keeping his hat on: "I want to talk with youI

At this invitation Jeff seemed reminded to take his hat off, and he put it on the floor beside his chair. "I'm not

in a scrape, this timeor, rather, I'm in the worst kind of a scrape, though it isn't the kind that you want bail

"I don't know whether you've noticedand if you haven't it don't make any differencethat I've seemed

Westover saw no reason why he should not be frank, and said: "Too much, I've fancied sometimes, for a

"Yes, I know that. Well, it's over, whether it was too much or too little." He laughed in a joyless, helpless

way, and looked deprecatingly at Westover. "I guess I've been making a fool of myselfthat's all."

"It's better to make a fool of one's self than to make a fool of some one else," said Westover, oracularly.

"Yes," said Jeff, apparently finding nothing more definite in the oracle than people commonly find in oracles.

"But I think," he went on, with a touch of bitterness, "that her mother might have told me that she was

"I don't know that she was bound to take you seriously, or to suppose you took yourself so, at your age and

with your prospects in life. If you want to know"Westover faltered, and then went on"she began to be

kind to you because she was afraid that you might think she didn't take your coming home secondcabin in

the right way; and one thing led to another. You mustn't blame her for what's happened."

Westover defended Mrs. Vostrand, but he did not feel strong in her defence; he was not sure that Durgin was

quite wrong, absurd as he had been. He sat down and looked up at his visitor under his brows.

Jeff gave a short, shamefaced laugh. "No, it's this you're such an old friend of Mrs. Vostrand's that I thought

she'd be pretty sure to tell you about it; and I wanted to askto askthat you wouldn't say anything to

"You are a boy! I shouldn't think of meddling with your affairs," said Westover; he got up again, and Jeff

Before noon the next day a district messenger brought Westover a letter which he easily knew, from, the now

belated tall, angular hand, to be from Mrs. Vostrand. It announced on a much crisscrossed little sheet that

she and Genevieve were inconsolably taking a very sudden departure, and were going on the twelveo'clock

train to New York, where Mr. Vostrand was to meet them. "In regard to that affair which I mentioned last

night, he withdraws his objections (we have had an overnight telegram), and so I suppose all will go well. I

cannot tell you how sorry we both are not to see you again; you have been such a dear, good friend to us; and

if you don't hear from us again at New York, you will from the other side. Genevieve had some very strange

news when she came in, and we both feel very sorry for the poor young fellow. You must console him from

us all you can. I did not know before how much she was attached to Gigi: but it turned out very fortunately

that she could say she considered herself bound to him, and did everything to save Mr. D.'s feelings."

Westover was not at Lion's Head again till the summer before Jeff's graduation. In the mean time the hotel

had grown like a living thing. He could not have imagined wings in connection with the main edifice, but it

had put forth wingsone that sheltered a new and enlarged dining room, with two stories of chambers

above, and another that hovered a parlor and ballroom under a like provision of chambers. An ell had been

pushed back on the level behind the house; the barn had been moved farther to the southward, and on its old

site a laundry built, with quarters for the help over it. All had been carefully, frugally, yet sufficiently done,

and Westover was not surprised to learn that it was all the effect of Jackson Durgin's ingenuity and energy.

Mrs. Durgin confessed to having no part in it; but she had kept pace, with Cynthia Whitwell's help, in the

housekeeping. As Jackson had cautiously felt his way to the needs of their public in the enlargement and

rearrangement of the hotel, the two housewives had watchfully studied, not merely the demands, but the

halfconscious instincts of their guests, and had responded to them simply and adequately, in the spirit of

Jackson's exterior and structural improvements. The walls of the new rooms were left unpapered and their

floors uncarpeted; there were thin rugs put down; the woodwork was merely stained. Westover found that

he need not to ask especially for some hot dish at night; there was almost the abundance of a dinner, though

Mrs. Durgin asked him the first day if he would not like to go into the servingroom and see it while they

were serving dinner. She tried to conceal her pride in the busy scenethe waitresses pushing in through one

valve of the doublehinged doors with their empty trays, and out through the other with the trays full laden;

delivering their dishes with the broken victual at the wicket, where the untouched portions were put aside and

the rest poured into the waste; following in procession along the reeking steamtable, with its great tanks of

soup and vegetables, where, the carvers stood with the joints and the trussed fowls smoking before them,

which they sliced with quick sweeps of their blades, or waiting their turn at the board where the little plates

with portions of fruit and dessert stood ready. All went regularly on amid a clatter of knives and voices and

dishes; and the clashing rise and fall of the wire baskets plunging the soiled crockery into misty depths,

whence it came up clean and dry without the touch of finger or towel. Westover could not deny that there

were elements of the picturesque in it, so that he did not respond quite in kind to Jeff's suggestion"Scene

The young fellow followed satirically at his mother's elbow, and made a mock of her pride in it, trying to

catch Westover's eye when she led him through the kitchen with its immense range, and introduced him to a

"Don't let him get away without seeing the laundry, mother," her son jeered at a final air of

"Jeff's mad because he wasn't consulted," she explained, "and because we don't run the house like his

"Oh, I'm not in it at all, Mr. Westover," said the young fellow. "I'm as much a passenger as you are. The only

"Well, one thing," said his mother, "is that we've got a higher class of boarders than we ever had before.

You'll see, Mr. Westover, if you stay on here till August. There's a class that boards all the year round, and

that knows what a hotel isabout as well as Jeff, I guess. You'll find 'em at the big city houses, the first of

the winter, and then they go down to Floridy or Georgy for February and March; and they get up to Fortress

Monroe in April, and work along north about the middle of May to them family hotels in the suburbs around

Boston; and they stay there till it's time to go to the shore. They stay at the shore through July, and then they

come here in August, and stay till the leaves turn. They're folks that live on their money, and they're the very

highest class, I guess. It's a round of gayety with 'em the whole year through."

Jeff, from the vantage of his greater worldly experience, was trying to exchange looks of intelligence with

Westover concerning those hotel dwellers whom his mother revered as aristocrats; but he did not openly

question her conceptions. "They've told me how they do, some of the ladies have," she went on. "They've got

the money for it, and they know how to get the most for their money. Why, Mr. Westover, we've got rooms in

this house, now, that we let for thirtyfive to fifty dollars a week for two persons, and folks like that take 'em

right along through August and September, and want a room apiece. It's different now, I can tell you, from

what it was when folks thought we was killin' 'em if we wanted ten or twelve dollars."

Westover had finished his dinner before this tour of the house began, and when it was over the two men

"You see, it's on the regular American lines," Jeff pursued, after parting with his mother. "Jackson's done it,

and he can't imagine anything else. I don't say it isn't well done in its way, but the way's wrong; it's stupid and

clumsy." When they were got so far from the hotel as to command a prospect of its ungainly mass sprawled

upon the plateau, his smouldering disgust burst out: "Look at it! Did you ever see anything like it? I wish the

Westover was aware in more ways than one of Jeff's exclusion from authority in the place, where he was

constantly set aside from the management as if his future were so definitely dedicated to another calling that

not even his advice was desired or permitted; and he could not help sympathizing a little with him when he

chafed at his rejection. He saw a great deal of him, and he thought him quite up to the average of Harvard's

Seniors in some essentials. He had been sobered, apparently, by experience; his unfortunate loveaffair

They had some long walks and long talks together, and in one of them Jeff opened his mind, if not his heart,

to the painter. He wanted to be the Landlord of the Lion's Head, which he believed he could make the best

hotel in the mountains. He knew, of course, that he could not hope to make any changes that did not suit his

mother and his brother, as long as they had the control, but he thought they would let him have the control

sooner if his mother could only be got to give up the notion of his being a lawyer. As nearly as he could

guess, she wanted him to be a lawyer because she did not want him to be a hotelkeeper, and her prejudice

against that was because she believed that selling liquor made her father a drunkard.

"Well, now you know enough about me, Mr. Westover, to know that drink isn't my danger."

"I went a little wild in my Freshman year, and I got into that scrape, but I've never been the worse for liquor

since; fact is, I never touch it now. There isn't any more reason why I should take to drink because I keep a

hotel than Jackson; but just that one time has set mother against it, and I can't seem to make her understand

that once is enough for me. Why, I should keep a temperance house, here, of course; you can't do anything

else in these days. If I was left to choose between hotel keeping and any other life that I know of, I'd choose

it every time," Jeff went on, after a moment of silence. "I like a hotel. You can be your own man from the

start; the start's made here, and I've helped to make it. All you've got to do is to have commonsense in the

hotel business, and you're sure to succeed. I believe I've got commonsense, and I believe I've got some ideas

that I can work up into a great success. The reason that most people fail in the hotel business is that they

waste so much, and the landlord that wastes on his guests can't treat them well. It's got so now that in the big

city houses they can't make anything on feeding people, and so they try to make it up on the rooms. I should

feed them wellI believe I know howand I should make money on my table, as they do in Europe.

I've thought a good many things out; my mind runs on it all the time; but I'm not going to bore you with it

Well, some time I'll tell you. But look here, Mr. Westover, I wish if mother gets to talking about me with you

that you'd let her know how I feel. We can't talk together, she and I, without quarrelling about it; but I guess

you could put in a word that would show her I wasn't quite a fool. She thinks I've gone crazy from seeing the

way they do things in Europe; that I'm conceited and unpatriotic, and I don't know what all." Jeff laughed as

"And would you be willing to settle down here in the country for the rest of your life, and throw away your

"What do the other fellows do with their Harvard training when they go into business, as ninetenths of them

do? Business is business, whether you keep a hotel or import drygoods or manufacture cotton or run a

railroad or help a big trust to cheat legally. Harvard has got to take a back seat when you get out of Harvard.

But you don't suppose that keeping a summer hotel would mean living in the country the whole time, do you?

That's the way mother does, but I shouldn't. It isn't good for the hotel, even. If I had such a place as Lion's

Head, I should put a man and his family into it for the winter to look after it, and I should go to town

myselfto Boston or New York, or I might go to London or Paris. They're not so far off, and it's so easy to

get to them that you can hardly keep away." Jeff laughed, and looked up at Westover from the log where he

sat, whittling a pine stick; Westover sat on the stump from which the log had been felled eight or ten years

"That's what I should do at first. But I don't believe I should have Lion's Head very long before I had another

hotelin Florida, or the Georgia uplands, or North Carolina, somewhere. I should take my help back and

forth; it would be as easy to run two hotels as oneeasier! It would keep my hand in. But if you want to

know, I'd rather stick here in the country, year in and year out, and run Lion's Head, than to be a lawyer and

hang round trying to get a case for nine or ten years. Who's going to support me? Do you suppose I want to

live on mother till I'm forty? She don't think of that. She thinks I can go right into court and begin

distinguishing myself, if I can fight the people off from sending me to Congress. I'd rather live in the country,

anyway. I think town's the place for winter, or twothree months of it, and after that I haven't got any use for

it. But mother, she's got this oldfashioned ambition to have me go to a city and set up there. She thinks that

if I was a lawyer in Boston I should be at the top of the heap. But I know better than that, and so do you; and I

want you to give her some little hint of how it really is: how it takes family and money and a lot of influence

It occurred to Westover, and not for the first time, that the frankest thing in Jeff Durgin was his disposition to

use his friends. It seemed to him that Jeff was always asking something of him, and it did not change the fact

that in this case he thought him altogether in the right. He said that if Mrs. Durgin spoke to him of the matter

he would not keep the light from her. He looked behind him, now, for the first time, in recognition of the

"Didn't you know it?" Jeff asked. "It changes a good deal every year, and you haven't been here for awhile,

"Not since Mrs. Marven's picnic," said Westover, and he added, quickly, to efface the painful association

"The woods have crowded back upon it so. It can't be more than half its old size."

"No," Jeff assented. He struck his heel against a fragment of the pine bough he had been whittling, and drove

it into the soft ground beside the log, and said, without looking up from it: "I met that woman at a dance last

winter. It wasn't her dance, but she was running it as if it were, just the way she did with the picnic. She

seemed to want to let bygones be bygones, and I danced with her daughter. She's a nice girl. I thought mother

did wrong about that." Now he looked at Westover. "She couldn't help it, but it wasn't the thing to do. A hotel

is a public house, and you can't act as if it wasn't. If mother hadn't known how to keep a hotel so well in other

ways, she might have ruined the house by not knowing in a thing like that. But we've got some of the people

with us this year that used to come here when we first took farm boarders; mother don't know that they're

ever so much nicer, socially, than the people that take the fiftydollar rooms." He laughed, and then he said,

seriously: "If I ever had a son, I don't believe I should let my pride in him risk doing him mischief. And if

you've a mind to let her understand that you believe I'm set against the law for good and all"

"I guess I shall not be your ambassador, so far as that. Why don't you tell her yourself?"

"She won't believe me," said Jeff, with a laugh. "She thinks I don't know my mind. And I don't like the way

we differ when we differ. We differ more than we mean to. I don't pretend to say I'm always right. She was

right about that other picnicthe one I wanted to make for Mrs. Vostrand. I suppose," he ended,

"No, I don't. I haven't heard from them for a year; not since You knew Genevieve was married?"

"I don't quite make it all out. Mr. Vostrand was very much opposed to it, Mrs. Vostrand told me; but he must

have given way at last; and he must have put up the money." Jeff looked puzzled, and Westover explained.

"You know the officers in the Italian armyand all the other armies in Europe, for that matterhave to

deposit a certain sum with the government before they can marry and in the case of Count Grassi, Mr.

"No, the girl wasn't to blame. I don't know that any one was to blame. But I'm afraid our girls wouldn't marry

"Well, I don't see why they shouldn't spend their money that way as well as any other," said Jeff, and this

proof of his impartiality suggested to Westover that he was not only indifferent to the mercenary international

marriages, which are a scandal to so many of our casuists, but had quite outlived his passion for the girl

"At any rate," Jeff added, "I haven't got anything to say against it. Mr. Westover, I've always wanted to say

one thing to you. Then I came to your room that night, I wanted to complain of Mrs. Vostrand for not letting

me know about the engagement; and I wasn't man enough to acknowledge that what you said would account

for their letting me make a fool of myself. But I believe I am now, and I want to say it."

"I'm glad you can see it in that way," said Westover, "and since you do, I don't mind saying that I think Mrs.

Vostrand might have been a little franker with you without being less kind. She was kind, but she wasn't quite

"Well, it's all over now," said Jeff, and he rose up and brushed the whittlings from his knees. "And I guess it's

That afternoon Westover saw Jeff helping Cynthia Whitwell into his buckboard, and then, after his lively

horse had made some paces of a start, spring to the seat beside her, and bring it to a stand. "Can I do anything

for you over at Lovewell, Mr. Westover?" he called, and he smiled toward the painter. Then he lightened the

reins on the mare's back; she squared herself for a start in earnest, and flashed down the sloping hotel road to

the highway below, and was lost to sight in the clump of woods to the southward.

"That's a good friend of yours, Cynthy," he said, leaning toward the girl with a simple comfort in her

proximity. She was dressed in a palepink color, with a hat of yet paler pink; without having a great deal of

fashion, she had a good deal of style. She looked bright and fresh; there was a dash of pink in her cheeks,

which suggested the color of the sweetbrier, its purity and sweetness, and if there was something in Cynthia's

character and temperament that suggested its thorns too, one still could not deny that she was like that flower.

She liked to shop, and she liked to ride after a good horse, as the neighbors would have said; she was going

over to Lovewell to buy a number of things, and Jeff Durgin was driving her there with the swift mare that

was his peculiar property. She smiled upon him without the usual reservations she contrived to express in her

"Well, I don't know anybody I'd rather have for my friend than Mr. Westover." She added: "He acted like a

Jeff laughed with shameless pleasure in the reminiscence her words suggested. "Well, I did get my

comeuppings that time. And I don't know but he's been a pretty good friend to me, too. I'm not sure he likes

"Nothing!" said Jeff, with a shout of laughter in his conviction. "I've done a lot of things to make him despise

me from the start. But if you like a person yourself, you want him to like you whether you deserve it or not."

"You say that because you always deserve it. You can't tell how it is with a fellow like me. I should want you

to like me, Cynthy, whatever you thought of me." He looked round into her face, but she turned it away.

They had struck the level, long for the hill country, at the foot of the hotel road, and the mare, that found

herself neither mounting nor descending a steep, dropped from the trot proper for an acclivity into a rapid

"This mare can walk like a Kentucky horse," said Jeff. "I believe I could teach her singlefoot." He added,

"Oh, I don't know as I look for them. Perhaps I don't need to." The pine woods were deep on either side. They

whispered in the thin, sweet wind, and gave out their odor in the high, westering sun. They covered with their

"This is nice," said Jeff, letting himself rest against the back of the seat. He stretched his left arm along the

"Because it has no right there, for one thing!" She drew herself a little aside and looked round at him. "You

"I shouldn't be riding with her: Girls don't go buggyriding in town any more," said Jeff, brutally.

"Oh, they'd go quick enough if I asked them up here in the country. Etiquette don't count with them when

"I'm not on a vacation; so it counts with me. Please take your arm away," said Cynthia.

Jeff was dumb. She was pleased with her hit, and laughed. But her laugh did not encourage him to put his

arm round her again. He let the mare walk on, and left her to resume the conversation at whatever point she

She made no haste to resume it. At last she said, with sufficient apparent remoteness from the subject they

had dropped: "Jeff, I don't know whether you want me to talk about it. But I guess I ought to, even if it isn't

"I want to know what you think, Cynthy," said Jeff, with the amorous resentment all gone from his voice.

"Sometimes folks outside notice the signs moreI don't mean that you're an outsider, as far as we're

She put by that point. "Father's noticed it, too; and he's with Jackson a good deal."

"I'll look after it. If he isn't so well, he's got to have a doctor. That medium's stuff can't do him any good.

"Cynthia, I've noticed that Jackson was weak, too; and it's no use pretending that he's simply worked down. I

"It's the one thing I can't very well make up my mind to speak to her about. I don't know what she would do."

He did not say, "If she lost Jackson," but Cynthia knew he meant that, and they were both silent. "Of course,"

he went on, "I know that she places a great deal of dependence upon you, but Jackson's her main stay. He's a

Cynthia did not protest against his selfreproach as he possibly hoped she would. She said: "I think Jackson's

got a very good mind. He reads a great deal, and he's thought a great deal, and when it comes to talking, I

never heard any one express themselves better. The other night, we were out looking at the starsI came

part of the way home with him; I didn't like to let him go alone, he seemed so feeble and he got to showing

me Mars. He thinks it's inhabited, and he's read all that the astronomers say about it, and the seas and the

canals that they've found on it. He spoke very beautifully about the other life, and then he spoke about death."

Cynthia's voice broke, and she pulled her handkerchief out of her belt, and put it to her eyes. Jeff's heart

melted in him at the sight; he felt a tender affection for her, very unlike the gross content he had enjoyed in

her presence before, and he put his arm round her again, but this time almost unconsciously, and drew her

toward him. She did not repel him; she even allowed her head to rest a moment on his shoulder; though she

quickly lifted it, and drew herself away, not resentfully, it seemed, but for her greater freedom in talking.

"I don't believe he's going to die," Jeff said, consolingly, more as if it were her brother than his that he meant.

"But he's a very sick man, and he's got to knock off and go somewhere. It won't do for him to pass another

winter here. He must go to California, or Colorado; they'd be glad to have him there, either of them; or he can

"What are you talking about, Jeff Durgin?" Cynthia demanded, severely." What would your mother do? What

"That brings me to something, Cynthia," said Jeff, "and I don't want you to say anything till I've got through.

I guess I could help mother run the place as well as Jackson, and I could stay here next winter."

"Now, you let me talk! My mind's made up about one thing: I'm not going to be a lawyer. I don't want to go

back to Harvard. I'm going to keep a hotel, and, if I don't keep one here at Lion's Head, I'm going to keep it

"Yes, you have! You've got everything to do with it, if you'll say one thing first. Cynthia, you know how I

feel about you. It's been so ever since we were boy and girl here. I want you to promise to marry me. Will

The girl seemed neither surprised nor very greatly pleased; perhaps her pleasure had spent itself in that

moment of triumphant expectation when she foresaw what was coming, or perhaps she was preoccupied in

"What do you say, Cynthia?" Jeff pursued, with more injury than misgiving in his voice at her delay in

"Oh yes, I presume I've always done thatever since we were boy and girl, as you say. But"

He could not find his voice quite as promptly as before. He cleared his throat before he asked: "Has Mr.

"Well, thenI always expected to tell youI did have a fancy for that girl, for Miss Vostrand, and I told her

"If you like to call it that. But I should call it taking a man that had been out of his head for a while, and had

"I don't know as I should ever feel safe with a man that had been out of his head once."

"You wouldn't find many men that hadn't," said Jeff, with a laugh that was rather scornful of her ignorance.

"No, I presume not," she sighed. "She was beautiful, and I believe she was good, too. She was very nice.

Perhaps I feel strangely about it. But, if she hadn't been so nice, I shouldn't have been so willing that you

"I suppose I don't understand," said Jeff, "but I know I was hard hit. What's the use? It's over. She's married. I

can't go back and unlive it all. But if you want time to thinkof course you doI've taken time enough"

He was about to lift the reins on the mare's back as a sign to her that the talk was over for the present, and to

quicken her pace, when Cynthia put out her hand and laid it on his, and said with a certain effect of authority:

"Just as you say, Cynthy;" and in token of intelligence he wound his arm round her neck and kissed her. It

was not the first kiss by any means; in the country kisses are not counted very serious, or at all binding, and

Cynthia was a country girl; but they both felt that this kiss sealed a solemn troth between them, and that a

Cynthia came back in time to go into the diningroom and see that all was in order there for supper before

the door opened. The waitresses knew that she had been out riding, as they called it, with Jeff Durgin; the fact

had spread electrically to them where they sat in a shady angle of the hotel listening to one who read a novel

aloud, and skipped all but the most exciting love parts. They conjectured that the pair had gone to Lovewell,

but they knew nothing more, and the subtlest of them would not have found reason for further conjecture in

Cynthia's behavior, when she came in and scanned the tables and the girls' dresses and hair, where they stood

ranged against the wall. She was neither whiter nor redder than usual, and her nerves and her tones were

under as good control as a girl's ever are after she has been out riding with a fellow. It was not such a great

thing, anyway, to ride with Jeff Durgin. First and last, nearly all the young lady boarders had been out with

After supper, when the girls had gone over to their rooms in the helps' quarters, and the guests had gathered

in the wide, low office, in the light of the fire kindled on the hearth to break the evening chill, Jeff joined

Cynthia in her inspection of the diningroom. She always gave it a last look, to see that it was in perfect

order for breakfast, before she went home for the night. Jeff went home with her; he was impatient of her

duties, but he was in no hurry when they stole out of the side door together under the stars, and began to stray

He lingered more and more as they drew near her father's house, in the abandon of a man's love. He wished to

give himself solely up to it, to think and to talk of nothing else, after a man's fashion. But a woman's love is

no such mere delight. It is serious, practical. For her it is all future, and she cannot give herself wholly up to

"Now, Jeff," she said, after a certain number of partings, in which she had apparently kept his duty clearly in

"Is that so?" he joked back. "Well, if I must, I must, I suppose. But I didn't think you'd take the whiphand so

"Well, I won't, then. But what are you in such a hurry to have mother know for? She's not going to object.

"It isn't that," said the girl, quickly. "If I had to go round a single day with your mother hiding this from her, I

should begin to hate you. I couldn't bear the concealment. I shall tell father as soon as I go in."

"Yes, he'll be all right, but if he wouldn't, and I knew it, I should have to tell him, all the same. Now,

She paused for a moment in her own room, to smooth her tumbled hair, and try to identify herself in her

glass. Then she went into the sitting room, where she found her father pulled up to the table, with his hat on,

and poring over a sheet of hieroglyphics, which represented the usual evening with planchette.

"Well, I wanted to, but he wouldn't hear of it. He's feelin' ever so much better tonight, and he wanted to go

Whitwell put his hand up and found that his daughter was right. He laughed, and said: "I guess I must 'a'

forgot it. We've had the most interestin' season with plantchette that I guess we've about ever had. She's said

"Well, never mind; I've got something more important to say than plantchette has," said Cynthia, and she

"He has!" The New England training is not such as to fit people for the expression of strong emotion, and the

best that Whitwell found himself able to do in view of the fact was to pucker his mouth for a whistle which

"Yesthis afternoon," said Cynthia, lifelessly. The tension of her nerves relaxed in a languor which was

evident even to her father, though his eyes still wandered to the sheet she had taken from him.

"Well, you don't seem over and above excited about it. Diddid your What did you say"

"I don't know as I ever give the subject much attention," said the philosopher. "I always meant to take it out

"Yes, I've accepted him," said the girl, with a sigh. "I guess I've always expected to."

"Well, I thought likely it would come to that, myself. All I can say, Cynthy, is 't he's a lucky feller."

Whitwell leaned back, bracing his knees against the table, which was one of his philosophic poses. "I have

sometimes believed that Jeff Durgin was goin' to turn out a blackguard. He's got it in him. He's as like his

gran'father as two peas, and he was an old devil. But you got to account in all these here heredity cases for

counteractin' influences. The Durgins are as good as wheat, right along, all of 'em; and I guess Mis' Durgin's

mother must have been a pretty good woman too. Mis' Durgin's all right, too, if she has got a will of her

own." Whitwell returned from his scientific inquiry to ask: "How 'll she take it?"

"I don't know," said Cynthia, dreamily, but without apparent misgiving. "That's Jeff's lookout."

"So 'tis. I guess she won't make much fuss. A woman never likes to see her son get married; but you've been a

kind of daughter to her so long. Well, I guess that part of it 'll be all right. Jackson," said Whitwell, in a tone

of relief, as if turning from an irrelevant matter to something of real importance, "was down here tonight

tryin' to ring up some them spirits from the planet Mars. Martians, he calls 'em. His mind's got to runnin' a

good deal on Mars lately. I guess it's this apposition that they talk about that does it. Mars comin' so much

nearer the earth by a million of miles or so, it stands to reason that he should be more influenced by the minds

on it. I guess it's a case o' that telepathy that Mr. Westover tells about. I judge that if he kept at it before Mars

gits off too far again he might make something out of it. I couldn't seem to find much sense in what

plantchette done tonight; we couldn't either of us; but she has her spells when you can't make head or tail of

her. But mebbe she's just leadin' up to something, the way she did about that broken shaft when Jeff come

Whitwell paused, and Cynthia seized the advantage of his getting round to Jeff again. "He wanted to give up

"Jeff did?" asked her father. " Well, you done a good thing that time, anyway, Cynthy. His mother 'd never

"There's something else she's got to get over, and I don't know how she ever will. He's going to give up the

"Yes. Don't tease, father! He says he's never cared about it, and he wants to keep a hotel. I thought that I'd

ought to tell him how we felt about Jackson's having a rest and going off somewhere; and he wanted to begin

at once. But I said if he left off the last year at Harvard I wouldn't have anything to do with him."

Whitwell put his hand in his pocket for his knife, and mechanically looked down for a stick to whittle. In

default of any, he scratched his head. "I guess she'll make it warm for him. She's had her mind set on his

studyin' law so long, 't she won't give up in a hurry. She can't see that Jackson ain't fit to help her run the hotel

any moretill he's had a rest, anywayand I believe she thinks her and Frank could run itand you. She'll

make an awful kick," said Whitwell, solemnly. "I hope you didn't encourage him, Cynthy?"

"I should encourage him," said the girl. "He's got the right to shape his own life, and nobody else has got the

right to do it; and I should tell his mother so, if she ever said anything to me about it."

"I do, father. Jeff would make a good landlord; he's got ideas about a hotel, and I can see that they're the right

ones. He's been out in the world, and he's kept his eyes open. He will make Lion's Head the best hotel in the

"Got it all mapped out!" said Whitwell, proudly, in his turn. "Look out you don't slip up in your calculations.

Jeff came into the ugly old family parlor, where his mother sat mending by the kerosenelamp which she had

kept through all the household changes, and pushed enough of her work aside from the corner of the table to

She looked up at him over her spectacles from the stocking she was darning; the china egg gleamed through

The mother's hand dropped at the end of the yarn she had drawn through the stocking heel, and she stared at

Jeff. Then she resumed her work with the decision expressed in her tone. "Your father lived to be sixty years

old, and Jackson a'n't forty! The doctor said there wa'n't any reason why he shouldn't live as long as his father

"I'm not saying he won't live to a hundred. I'm saying he oughtn't to stay another winter here," Jeff said,

Mrs. Durgin was silent for a time, and then she said. "Jeff, is that your notion about Jackson, or whose is it?"

Mrs, Durgin waited a moment. Then she began, with a feeling quite at variance with her words:

"Well, I'll thank Cynthy Whit'ell to mind her own business! Of course," she added, and in what followed her

feeling worked to the surface in her words, "I know 't she thinks the world of Jackson, and he does of her; and

I presume she means well. I guess she'd be more apt to notice, if there was any change, than what I should.

Jeff told, as nearly as he could remember, and he told what Cynthia and he had afterward jointly worked out

as to the best thing for Jackson to do. Mrs. Durgin listened frowningly, but not disapprovingly, as it seemed;

Jeff laughed, with his head down. "Well, I guess you and Cynthy could run it, with Frank and Mr. Whitwell."

"Mr. Whit'ell!" said Mrs. Durgin, concentrating in her accent of his name the contempt she could not justly

"Oh," Jeff went on, " I did think that I could take hold with you, if you could bring yourself to let me off this

"Jeff!" said his mother, reproachfully. "You know you don't mean that you'd give up your last year in

"I do mean it, but I don't expect you to do it; and I don't ask it. I suggested it to Cynthy, when we got to

"I don't know when Cynthy hasn't shown sense; except once, and then I guess it was my fault."

"Why, this afternoon I asked her to marry me some time, and she said she would." He looked at his mother

and laughed, and then he did not laugh. He had expected her to be pleased; he had thought to pave the way

with this confession for the declaration of his intention not to study law, and to make his engagement to

Cynthia serve him in reconciling his mother to the other fact. But a menacing suspense followed his words.

His mother broke out at last: "You asked Cynthy Whit'ell to marry you! And she said she would! Well, I can

"And I can tell you she will!" Jeff stormed back. He rose to his feet and stood over his mother.

"Look out, mother! Don't you say anything against Cynthia! She's been the best girl to you in the world, and

you know it. She's been as true to you as Jackson has himself. She hasn't got a selfish bone in her body, and

she's so honest she couldn't design anything against you or any one, unless she told you first. Now you take

Mrs. Durgin was not moved by his storming, but she was inwardly convinced of error. "I do take it back.

Cynthy is all right. She's all you say and more. It's your fault, then, and you've got yourself to thank, for

"If Cynthy packs, I pack!" said Jeff. " Understand that. The moment she leaves this house I leave it, too, and

I'll marry her anyway. Frank 'd leave andandPshaw! What do you care for that? But I don't know what

you mean! I always thought you liked Cynthy and respected her. I didn't believe I could tell you a thing that

would please you better than that she had said she would have me. But if it don't, all right."

Mrs. Durgin held her peace in bewilderment; she stared at her son with dazed eyes, under the spectacles lifted

above her forehead. She felt a change of mood in his unchanged tone of defiance, and she met him half way.

"I tell you I take back what I called Cynthia, and I told you so. Butbut I didn't ever expect you to marry

"Why didn't you? There isn't one of the summer folks to compare with her. She's got more sense than all of

"Oh, I know! You thought I'd see somebody in Bostonsome swell girl. Well, they wouldn't any of them

"I tell you they wouldn't look at me. You don't understand about these things, and I do. They marry their own

kind, and I'm not their kind, and I shouldn't be if I was Daniel Webster himself. Daniel Webster! Who

remembers him, or cares for him, or ever did? You don't believe it? You think that because I've been at

HarvardOh, can't I make you see it? I'm what they call a jay in Harvard, and Harvard don't count if you're

His mother looked at him without speaking. She would not confess the ambition he taxed her with, and

perhaps she had nothing so definite in her mind. Perhaps it was only her pride in him, and her faith in a

splendid future for him, that made her averse to his marriage in the lot she had always known, and on a little

"I don't know what you mean by being a jay. But I guess we better not say anything more about this

"All right," Jeff returned. There never were any formal goodnights between the Durgins, and he went away

His mother remained sitting where he left her. Two or three times she drew her empty darningneedle

She was still sitting there when Jackson passed on his way to bed, after leaving the office in charge of the

night porter. He faltered, as he went by, and as he stood on the threshold she told him what Jeff had told her.

"That's good," he said, lifelessly. "Good for Jeff," he added, thoughtfully, conscientiously.

"Why a'n't it good for her, too?" demanded Jeff's mother, in quick resentment of the slight put upon him.

"I presume she is. She's always cared for him, I guess. She'll know how to manage him."

"I don't know," said Mrs. Durgin, " as I like to have you talk so, about Jeff. He was here, just now, wantin' to

give up his last year in Harvard, so 's to let you go off on a vacation. He thinks you've worked yourself

Jackson made no recognition of Jeff's professed selfsacrifice. "I don't want any vacation. I'm feeling

firstrate now. I guess that stuff I had from the writin' medium has begun to take hold of me. I don't know

when I've felt so well. I believe I'm going to get stronger than ever I was. Jeff say I needed a rest?"

Something like a smile of compassion for the delusion of his brother dawned upon the sick man's wasted

face, which was blotched with large freckles, and stared with dim, large eyes from out a framework of

Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia did not seek any formal meeting the next morning. The course of their work

brought them together, but it was not till after they had transacted several household affairs of pressing

"Yes," said Mrs. Durgin, with a certain dryness, which was half humorous. "I presume, if you two are

"I guess we're satisfied," said the girl, with a tremor of relief which she tried to hide.

Nothing more was said, and there was no physical demonstration of affection or rejoicing between the

women. They knew that the time would come when they would talk over the affair down to the bone

together, but now they were content to recognize the fact, and let the time for talking arrive when it would. "I

guess," said Mrs. Durgin, "you'd better go over to the helps' house and see how that youngest Miller girl's

gittin' along. She'd ought to give up and go home if she a'n't fit for her work."

"I'll go and see her," said Cynthia. " I don't believe she's strong enough for a waitress, and I have got to tell

"Well," returned Mrs. Durgin, glumly, after a moment's reflection, "I shouldn't want you should hurry her.

Jeff had been lurking about for the event of the interview, and he waylaid Cynthia on the path to the helps'

"Yes, I know all about that," said Jeff. "Well, mother took it just right, didn't she? You can't always count on

"I guess so," said the girl, demurely; and she looked away from him to smile her pleasure in the fact.

"But I believe if she hadn't known you were with her about my last year in Harvardit would have been

different. I could see, when I brought it in that you wanted me to go back, her mind was made up for you."

"Oh, I knew it would clinch her. I understand mother. If you want something from her you mustn't ask it

straight out. You must propose something very disagreeable. Then when she refuses that, you can come in for

"I don't know," said Cynthia, " as I should like to think that your mother had been tricked into feeling right

"Not that, Jeff," said the girl, tenderly. "But you know what I mean. I hope you talked it all out fully with

"I don't believe in crossing a river till I come to it," said Jeff. "I didn't say anything to her about that."

"What had your going back to Harvard to do with it? If your mother thinks I'm with her in that, she'll think

I'm with her in the other. And I'm not. I'm with you." She let her hand find his, as they walked side by side,

"It's the greatest thing, Cynthy," he said, breathlessly, "to have you with me in that. But, if you said I ought to

"I shouldn't say that, for I believe you're right; but even if I believed you were wrong, I shouldn't say it. You

have a right to make your life what you want it; and your mother hasn't. Only she must know it, and you must

"And I don't like to use it. But I know how it is. You're afraid that the brunt of it will come on ME. She'll

"Well, now, I'm not afraid of anything she can say; and what could she do? She can't part us, unless you let

"I don't see it in that light. I might change my mind, and still go on and study law."

Jeff did not answer at once. He walked beside her with a face of trouble that became one of resolve in the set

jaws. "I guess you're right, Cynthy. She's got to know the worst, and the sooner she knows it the better."

He had another moment of faltering. "You don't want I should talk it over with Mr. Westover?"

"If you want to see it in the right light, you can think you've let it run on till after you're out of college, and

then you've got to tell her. Suppose she asked you how long you had made up your mind against the law, how

should you feel? And if she asked me whether I'd known it all along, and I had to say I had, and that I'd

"She mightn't ask any such question," said Jeff, gloomily. Cynthia gave a little impatient "Oh!" and he

hastened to add: "But you're right; I've got to tell her. I'll tell her tonight"

"Yes; and I'll go with you as soon as I've seen the youngest Miller girl." They had reached the helps' house

now, and Cynthia said: "You wait outside here, and I'll go right back with you. Oh, I hope it isn't doing wrong

to put it off till I've seen that girl!" She disappeared through the door, and Jeff waited by the steps outside,

plucking up one long grass stem after another and biting it in two. When Cynthia came out she said: "I guess

"Do you know what I think of you, Cynthy?" asked Jeff, hurrying to keep up with her quick steps. "You've

"I'll see that you don't break down," said Jeff, tenderly. "It's the greatest thing to have you go with me!"

"Why, don't you SEE?" she lamented. "If you went alone, and told your mother that I approved of it, you

would look as if you were afraid, and wanted to get behind me; and I'm not going to have that."

They found. Mrs. Durgin in the dark entry of the old farmhouse, and Cynthia said, with involuntary

She led the way to the old parlor, and she checked Mrs. Durgin's question, "Has that Miller girl"

"It isn't about her," said Cynthy, pushing the door to. "It's about me and Jeff."

Mrs. Durgin became aware of Jeff's presence with an effect of surprise. "There a'n't anything more, is there?"

"It's just this, mother: Cynthy thinks I ought to tell youand she thinks I ought to have told you last

"And I approve of his not doing it," Cynthia promptly followed, and she put herself beside Jeff where he

She looked from one to the other of the faces before her. "I'm sorry a son of mine," she said, with dignity,

"had to be told how to act with his mother. But, if he had, I don't know as anybody had a better right to do it

than the girl that's going to marry him. And I'll say this, Cynthia Whitwell, before I say anything else: you've

There was an uncomfortable moment before Cynthia said: "He expected to tell you."

"Oh Yes! I know," said his mother, sadly. She added, sharply: "And did be expect to tell me what he intended

The mother of the bold, rebellious boy that Jeff had been stirred in Mrs. Durgin's heart, and she looked at him

with the eyes, that used to condone his mischief. But she said: "I guess you'll find out that there's more than

"Yes, there are two: you and Jackson; and I don't know but what three, if you count Cynthy, here."

His mother turned to the girl. "You think this fellow's got sense enough to keep a hotel?"

Jeff interposed. "You think that all the college graduates turn out lawyers and doctors and professors? Some

of 'em are mighty glad to sweep out banks in hopes of a clerkship; and some take any sort of a place in a mill

or a business house, to work up; and some bum round out West 'on cattle ranches; and some, if they're lucky,

Cynthia followed with the generalization: "I don't believe anybody can know too much to keep a hotel. It

"I guess there's a pair of you," said Mrs. Durgin, with superficial contempt. She was silent for a time, and

they waited. "Well, there!" she broke out again. "I've got something to chew upon for a spell, I guess. Go

along, now, both of you! And the next time you've got to face your mother, Jeff, don't you come in lookin'

"I guess so," the girl assented, with a certain grief in her voice. "I wish you had told her first!"

"Oh, never mind that now!" cried Jeff, and in the dim passageway he took her in his arms and kissed her.

He would have released her, but she lingered in his embrace. "Will you promise that if there's ever anything

The will of Jeff's mother relaxed its grip upon the purpose so long held, as if the mere strain of the tenacity

had wearied and weakened it. When it finally appeared that her ambition for her son was not his ambition for

himself and would never be, she abandoned it. Perhaps it was the easier for her to forego her hopes of his

distinction in the world, because she had learned before that she must forego her hopes of him in other ways.

She had vaguely fancied that with the acquaintance his career at Harvard would open to him Jeff would make

a splendid marriage. She had followed darkling and stumbling his course in society as far as he would report

it to her, and when he would not suffer her to glory in it, she believed that he was forbidding her from a pride

that would not recognize anything out of the common in it. She exulted in his pride, and she took all his

At the bottom of her heart she had both fear and contempt of all towns people, whom she generalized from

her experience of them as summer folks of a greater or lesser silliness. She often found herself unable to cope

with them, even when she felt that she had twice their sense; she perceived that they had something from

their training that with all her undisciplined force she could never hope to win from her own environment.

But she believed that her son would have the advantages which baffled her in them, for he would have their

environment; and she had wished him to rivet his hold upon those advantages by taking a wife from among

them, and by living the life of their world. Her wishes, of course, had no such distinct formulation, and the

feeling she had toward Cynthia as a possible barrier to her ambition had no more definition. There had been

times when the fitness of her marriage with Jeff had moved the mother's heart to a jealousy that she always

kept silent, while she hoped for the accident or the providence which should annul the danger. But Genevieve

Vostrand had not been the kind of accident or the providence that she would have invoked, and when she saw

Jeff's fancy turning toward her, Mrs. Durgin had veered round to Cynthia. All the same she kept a keen eye

upon the young ladies among the summer folks who came to Lion's Head, and tacitly canvassed their merits

and inclinations with respect to Jeff in the oftenimagined event of his caring for any one of them. She found

that her artfully casual references to her son's being in Harvard scarcely affected their mothers in the right

way. The fact made them think of the head waiters whom they had met at other hotels, and who were

working their way through Dartmouth or Williams or Yale, and it required all the force of Jeff's robust

personality to dissipate their erroneous impressions of him. He took their daughters out of their arms and

from under their noses on long drives upon his buckboard, and it became a convention with them to treat his

Whether he was indifferent, or whether the young ladies were coy, none of these official flirtations came to

anything. He seemed not to care for one more than another; he laughed and joked with them all, and had an

official manner with each which served somewhat like a disparity of years in putting them at their ease with

him. They agreed that he was very handsome, and some thought him very talented; but they questioned

whether he was quite what you would call a gentleman. It is true that this misgiving attacked them mostly in

the mass; singly, they were little or not at all troubled by it, and they severally behaved in an unprincipled

Mrs. Durgin had the courage of her own purposes, but she had the fear of Jeff's. After the first pang of the

disappointment which took final shape from his declaration that he was going to marry Cynthia, she did not

really care much. She had the habit of the girl; she respected her, she even loved her. The children, as she

thought of them, had known each other from their earliest days; Jeff had persecuted Cynthia throughout his

graceless boyhood, but he had never intimidated her; and his mother, with all her weakness for him, felt that

it was well for him that his wife should be brave enough to stand up against him.

She formulated this feeling no more than the others, but she said to Westover, whom Jeff bade her tell of the

engagement: "It a'n't exactly as I could 'a' wished it to be. But I don't know as mothers are ever quite suited

with their children's marriages. I presume it's from always kind of havin' had her round under my feet ever

since she was born, as you may say, and seein' her family always so shiftless. Well, I can't say that of Frank,

either. He's turned out a fine boy; but the father! Cynthy is one of the most capable girls, smart as a trap, and

bright as a biscuit. She's masterful, too! she NEED to have a will of her own with Jeff."

Something of the insensate pride that mothers have in their children's faults, as their quick tempers, or their

wastefulness, or their revengefulness, expressed itself in her tone; and it was perhaps this that irritated

"I hope he'll never let her know it. I don't think a strong will is a thing to be prized, and I shouldn't consider it

one of Cynthia's good points. The happiest life for her would be one that never forced her to use it."

"I don't know as I understand you exactly," said Mrs. Durgin, with some dryness. "I know Jeff's got rather of

a domineering disposition, but I don't believe but she can manage him without meetin' him on his own

"Then you think he's shown sense in choosin' of her?" pursued Jeff's mother, resolute to find some praise of

"Well, I guess you're right," Mrs. Durgin acquiesced, as much to Jeff's advantage as she could. "You know I

was always afraid he would make a fool of himself, but I guess he's kept his eyes pretty well open all the

while. Well!" She closed the subject with this exclamation. "Him and Cynthy's been at me about Jackson,"

she added, abruptly. "They've cooked it up between 'em that he's out of health or run down or something."

Her manner referred the matter to Westover, and he said: "He isn't looking so well this summer. He ought to

"That's what they thought," said Mrs. Durgin, smiling in her pleasure at having their opinion confirmed by

"I guess, if you could get Jackson to go away at all, it would be to some of them old Bible countries," said

Mrs. Durgin. "We've got to have a fight to get him off, make the best of it, and I've thought it over since the

children spoke about it, and I couldn't seem to see Jackson willin' to go out to Californy or Colorady, to either

of his brothers. But I guess he would go to Egypt. That a good climate for thehis complaint?"

She entered eagerly into the question, and Westover promised to write to a Boston doctor, whom he knew

"Tell him how it is," said Mrs. Durgin, "and the tussle we shall have to have anyway to make Jackson believe

he'd ought to have a rest. He'll go to Egypt if he'll go anywheres, because his mind keeps runnin' on Bible

questions, and it 'll interest him to go out there; and we can make him believe it's just to bang around for the

winter. He's terrible hopeful." Now that she began to speak, all her longrepressed anxiety poured itself out,

and she hitched her chair nearer to Westover and wistfully clutched his sleeve. "That's the worst of Jackson.

You can't make him believe anything's the matter. Sometimes I can't bear to hear him go on about himself as

if he was a well young man. He expects that medium's stuff is goin' to cure him!"

"Oh, don't I know it! Ha'n't I seen my children and my husband Oh, do ask that doctor to answer as quick

Westover had a difficulty in congratulating Jeff which he could scarcely define to himself, but which was like

that obscure resentment we feel toward people whom we think unequal to their good fortune. He was

ashamed of his grudge, whatever it was, and this may have made him overdo his expressions of pleasure. He

was sensible of a false cordiality in them, and he checked himself in a flow of forced sentiment to say, more

honestly: "I wish you'd speak to Cynthia for me. You know how much I think of her, and how much I want to

"I'll tell her that; she'll like that," said Jeff. "She thinks the world of you."

"And I guess she'll be glad you sent word. She's been wondering what you would say; she's always so afraid

"Is she? You're not afraid of me, are you? But perhaps you don't think so much of me."

"I guess Cynthia and I think alike on that point," said Jeff, without abating Westover's discomfort.

There was a stress of sharp cold that year about the 20th of August. Then the weather turned warm again, and

held fine till the beginning of October, within a week of the time when Jackson was to sail. It had not been so

hard to make him consent when he knew where the doctor wished him to go, and he had willingly profited by

Westover's suggestions about getting to Egypt. His interest in the matter, which he tried to hide at first under

a mask of decorous indifference, mounted with the fire of Whitwell's enthusiasm, and they held nightly

councils together, studying his course on the map, and consulting planchette upon the points at variance that

rose between them, while Jombateeste sat with his chair tilted against the wall, and pulled steadily at his pipe,

which mixed its strong fumes with the smell of the kerosenelamp and the perennial odor of potatoes in the

Toward the end of September Westover spent the night before he went back to town with them. After a

season with planchette, their host pushed himself back with his knees from the table till his chair reared upon

its hind legs, and shoved his hat up from his forehead in token of philosophical mood.

"I tell you, Jackson," he said, "you'd ought to get hold o' some them occult devils out there, and squeeze their

"I don't think there are," said Westover. "Unless Jackson should come across some wandering Hindu. Or he

"Do it, Jackson!" his friend conjured him. "May cost you something more, but it 'll be worth the money. If it's

true, what some them Blavetsky fellers claim, you can visit us here in your astral bodygit in with 'em the

right way. I should like to have you try it. What's the reason India wouldn't be as good for him as Egypt,

"I suppose the climate's rather too moist; the heat would be rather trying to him there."

"Well, I guess that's so." Whitwell tilted his backward sloping hat to one side, so as to scratch the northeast

"But as far as that is concerned," said Westover, "and the doctrine of immortality generally is concerned,

"Everything. Egypt is the home of the belief in a future life; it was carried from Egypt to Greece. He might

"Why, man!" cried Whitwell. "Do you mean to say that them old Hebrew saints, Joseph's brethren, that went

down into Egypt after corn, didn't know about immortality, and them Egyptian devils did?"

"There's very little proof in the Old Testament that the Israelites knew of it."

"I guess he's right," said Jackson. "There's something a little about it in Job, and something in the Psalms: but

"I don't say that," Westover interposed. "But they had it before we had. As we imagine it, we got it though

Jombateeste, who had taken his pipe out of his mouth in a controversial manner, put it back again.

Westover added, "But there's no question but the Egyptians believed in the life hereafter, and in future

rewards and punishments for the deeds done in the body, thousands of years before our era."

Jombateeste took his pipe out again. "Hit show they got good sense. They knowthey feel it in their

bonewhat goin' 'appenwhen you dead. Me, I guess they got some prophet find it hout for them; then

"I guess that's something so, Jombateeste," said Whitwell. "It don't stand to reason that folks without any

alphabet, as you may say, and only a lot of pictures for words, like Injuns, could figure out the immortality of

the soul. They got the idee by inspiration somehow. Why, here! It's like this. Them Pharaohs must have

always been clawin' out for the Hebrews before they got a hold of Joseph, and when they found out the true

doctrine, they hushed up where they got it, and their priests went on teachin' it as if it was their own."

"Well, it don't matter a great deal where they got it, so they got it," said Jackson, as he rose.

"All there is about it," said the sick man, solemnly, with a frail effort to straighten himself, to which his

sunken chest would not respond, "is this: no man ever did figure that out for himself. A man sees folks die,

and as far as his senses go, they don't live again. But somehow he knows they do; and his knowledge comes

"That's w'at I say," Jombateeste hastened to interpose. "Got it from the 'Ebrew. Feel it in 'is bone."

Out under the stars Jackson and Westover silently mounted the hillside together. At one of the

thankyoumarms in the road the sick man stopped, like a weary horse, to breathe. He took off his hat and

wiped the sweat of weakness that had gathered upon his forehead, and looked round the sky, powdered with

"Yes, it is fine," Westover assented. "But the stars of our Northern nights are nothing to what you'll see in

Jackson repeated, vaguely: "Egypt! Where I should like to go is Mars." He fixed his eyes on the flaming

planets, in a long stare. "But I suppose they have their own troubles, same as we do. They must get sick and

die, like the rest of us. But I should like to know more about 'em. You believe it's inhabited, don't you?"

Westover's agnosticism did not, somehow, extend to Mars. "Yes, I've no doubt of it."

Jackson seemed pleased. "I've read everything I can lay my hands on about it. I've got a notion that if there's

any choosin', after we get through here, I should like to go to Mars for a while, or as long as I was a little

homesick still, and wanted to keep as near the earth as I could," he added, quaintly.

Westover laughed. "You could study up the subject of irrigation, there; they say that's what keeps the parallel

markings green on Mars; and telegraph a few hints to your brother in Colorado, after the Martians perfect

Perhaps the invalid's fancy flagged. He drew a long, ragged breath. "I don't know as I care to leave home,

much. If it wa'n't a kind of duty, I shouldn't." He seemed impelled by a sudden need to say, "How do you

Westover preferred not to meet his overture. You'll be back, you know, almost as soon as the season

Jackson seemed to find the opening he was seeking, in Westover's tone. "What do you think of gettin'

"We haven't either of us thought so well of it as to try it, Jackson," said the painter, jocosely.

Jackson was silent. Then, "I a'n't one of them," he said, abruptly, "that think a man's goin' to be made over by

marryin' this woman or that. If he a'n't goin' to be the right kind of a man himself, he a'n't because his wife's a

good woman. Sometimes I think that a man's wife is the last person in the world that can change his

disposition. She can influence him about this and about that, but she can't change him. It seems as if he

"That's true," Westover assented. "We're terribly inflexible. Nothing but something like a change of heart, as

they used to call it, can make us different, and even then we're apt to go back to our old shape. When you

look at it in that light, marriage seems impossible. Yet it takes place every day!"

"It's a great risk for a woman," said Jackson, putting on his hat and stirring for an onward movement. "But I

presume that if the man is honest with her it's the best thing she can have. The great trouble is for the man to

He made Jackson promise to spend a day with him in Boston, on his way to take the Mediterranean steamer

at New York. When they met he yielded to an impulse which the invalid's forlornness inspired, and went on

to see him off. He was glad that he did that, for, though Jackson was not sad at parting, he was visibly

Of course he talked away from it. "I guess I've left 'em in pretty good shape for the winter at Lion's Head," he

said. "I've got Whitwell to agree to come up and live in the house with mother, and she'll have Cynthy with

He had said something like this before, but Westover could see that it comforted him to repeat it, and he

encouraged him to do so in full. He made him talk about getting home in the spring, after the frost was out of

the ground, but he questioned involuntarily, while the sick man spoke, whether he might not then be lying

under the sands that had never known a frost since the glacial epoch. When the last warning for visitors to go

ashore came, Jackson said, with a wan smile, while he held Westover's hand: "I sha'n't forget this very soon."