The Landlord At Lions Head, V2 ......................................................................................................................1

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

XXVII......................................................................................................................................................1

XXVIII. ....................................................................................................................................................4

XXIX ......................................................................................................................................................10

XXX. ......................................................................................................................................................13

XXXI. .....................................................................................................................................................16

XXXII....................................................................................................................................................18

XXXIII. ..................................................................................................................................................22

XXXIV. ..................................................................................................................................................26

XXXV. ...................................................................................................................................................28

XXXVI. ..................................................................................................................................................32

XXXVII.................................................................................................................................................35

XXXVIII. ...............................................................................................................................................38

XXXIX ...................................................................................................................................................44

XL..........................................................................................................................................................47

XLI. ........................................................................................................................................................50

XLII. .......................................................................................................................................................54

XLIII......................................................................................................................................................62

XLIV ......................................................................................................................................................65

XLV.......................................................................................................................................................70

XLVI ......................................................................................................................................................73

XLVII. ....................................................................................................................................................76

XLVIII...................................................................................................................................................80

XLIX. .....................................................................................................................................................83

L.............................................................................................................................................................88

LI. ...........................................................................................................................................................93

LII..........................................................................................................................................................97

LIII.......................................................................................................................................................101

LIV. ......................................................................................................................................................104

Jackson kept his promise to write to Westover, but he was better than his word to his mother, and wrote to her

"I seem just to live from letter to letter. It's ridic'lous," she said to Cynthia once when the girl brought the

mail in from the barn, where the men folks kept it till they had put away their horses after driving over from

Lovewell with it. The trains on the branch road were taken off in the winter, and the postoffice at the hotel

was discontinued. The men had to go to the town by cutter, over a highway that the winds sifted half full of

snow after it had been broken out by the oxteams in the morning. But Mrs. Durgin had studied the steamer

days and calculated the time it would take letters to come from New York to Lovewell; and, unless a blizzard

was raging, some one had to go for the mail when the day came. It was usually Jombateeste, who reverted in

winter to the type of habitant from which he had sprung. He wore a blue woollen cap, like a large sock,

pulled over his ears and close to his eyes, and below it his cleanshaven brown face showed. He had blue

woollen mittens, and boots of russet leather, without heels, came to his knees; he got a pair every time he

went home on St. John's day. His lean little body was swathed in several short jackets, and he brought the

letters buttoned into one of the innermost pockets. He produced the letter from Jackson promptly enough

when Cynthia came out to the barn for it, and then he made a show of getting his horse out of the cutter

shafts, and shouting international reproaches at it, till she was forced to ask, "Haven't you got something for

"I don' know. I think I drop something on the road. I saw something white; maybe snow; good deal of snow."

"W'at you want letter for? Always same thing. Well! 'Old the 'oss; I goin' to feel."

Jombateeste felt in one pocket after another, while Cynthia clung to the colt's bridle, and he was uncertain till

the last whether he had any letter for her. When it appeared she made a flying snatch at it and ran; and the

The girl somehow always possessed herself of what was in her letters before she reached the room where

Mrs. Durgin was waiting for hers. She had to read that aloud to Jackson's mother, and in the evening she had

to read it again to Mrs. Durgin and Whitwell and Jombateeste and Frank, after they had done their chores,

and they had gathered in the old farm house parlor, around the airtight sheetiron stove, in a heat of eighty

degrees. Whitwell listened, with planchette ready on the table before him, and he consulted it for telepathic

He got very little out of the perverse instrument. "I can't seem to work her. If Jackson was here"

"We shouldn't need to ask planchette about him," Cynthia once suggested, with the spare sense of humor that

"Well, I guess that's something so," her father candidly admitted. But the next time he consulted the helpless

"The trouble seems to be that planchette can't tell," said Mrs. Durgin, and they all laughed. They were not

people who laughed a great deal, and they were each intent upon some point in the future that kept them from

pleasure in the present. The little Canuck was the only one who suffered himself a contemporaneous

consolation. His early faith had so far lapsed from him that he could hospitably entertain the wild psychical

conjectures of Whitwell without an accusing sense of heresy, and he found the winter of northern New

England so mild after that of Lower Canada that he experienced a high degree of animal comfort in it, and

looked forward to nothing better. To be well fed, well housed, and well heated; to smoke successive pipes

while the others talked, and to catch through his smokewreaths vague glimpses of their meanings, was

enough. He felt that in being promoted to the care of the stables in Jackson's absence he occupied a dignified

and responsible position, with a confidential relation to the exile which justified him in sending special

The exile's letters said very little about his health, which in the sense of no news his mother held to be good

news, but they were full concerning the monuments and the ethnological interest of life in Egypt.

They were largely rescripts of each day's observations and experiences, close and full, as his mother liked

them in regard to fact, and generously philosophized on the side of politics and religion for Whitwell. The

Eastern question became in the snowchoked hills of New England the engrossing concern of this

speculative mind, and he was apt to spring it upon Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia at mealtimes and other

defenceless moments. He tried to debate it with Jombateeste, who conceived of it as a form of spiritualistic

inquiry, and answered from the hayloft, where he was throwing down fodder for the cattle to Whitwell,

volubly receiving it on the barn floor below, that he believed, him, everybody got a hastral body, English

"Guess you mean Moslems," said Whitwell, and Jombateeste asked the difference, defiantly.

The letters which came to Cynthia could not be made as much a general interest, and, in fact, no one else

cared so much for them as for Jackson's letters, not even Jeff's mother. After Cynthia got one of them, she

would ask, perfunctorily, what Jeff said, but when she was told there was no news she did not press her

"If Jackson don't get back in time next summer," Mrs. Durgin said, in one of the talks she had with the girl, "I

"I guess we shall want a little help from you," said Cynthia, demurely. She did not refuse the implication of

Mrs. Durgin's words, but she would not assume that there was more in them than they expressed.

When Jeff came home for the three days' vacation at Thanksgiving, he wished again to relinquish his last year

at Harvard, and Cynthia had to summon all her forces to keep him to his promise of staying. He brought

home the books with which he was working off his conditions, with a half hearted intention of study, and

she took hold with him, and together they fought forward over the ground he had to gain. His mother was

"What is the use?" she asked. "He's give up the law, and he might as well commence here first as last, if he's

The girl had no reason to urge against this; she could only urge her feeling that he ought to go back and take

"If you're going to keep Lion's Head the way you pretend you are," she said to him, as she could not say to

his mother, "you want to keep all your Harvard friends, don't you, and have them remember you? Go back,

Jeff, and don't you come here again till after you've got your degree. Never mind the Christmas vacation, nor

the Easter. Stay in Cambridge and work off your conditions. You can do it, if you try. Oh, don't you suppose I

He went back, with a kind of grudge in his heart, which he confessed in his first letter home to her, when he

told her that she was right and he was wrong. He was sure now, with the impulse which their work on them in

common had given him, that he should get his conditions off, and he wanted her and his mother to begin

preparing their minds to come to his Class Day. He planned how they could both be away from the hotel for

that day. The house was to be opened on the 20th of June, but it was not likely that there would be so many

people at once that they could not give the 21st to Class Day; Frank and his father could run Lion's Head

somehow, or, if they could not, then the opening could be postponed till the 24th. At all events, they must not

fail to come. Cynthia showed the whole letter to his mother, who refused to think of such a thing, and then

"Yes, he is," said Cynthia; and she laughed for shame and pleasure as she confessed, "I was thinking he was

She hung her head and turned her face away. But Mrs. Durgin understood. "You be'n expectin' it all along,

"I presume," said the elder woman, "that he's talked to you about it. He never tells me much. I don't see why

"Oh, I don't know. But it's the day the graduating class have to themselves, and all their friends come."

"Well, I don't know why anybody should want to go," said Mrs. Durgin. "I sha'n't. Tell him he won't want to

own me when he sees me. What am I goin' to wear, I should like to know? What you goin' to wear, Cynthy?"

Jeff's place at Harvard had been too long fixed among the jays to allow the hope of wholly retrieving his

condition now. It was too late for him to be chosen in any of the nicer clubs or societies, but he was not

beyond the mounting sentiment of comradery, which begins to tell in the last year among college men, and

which had its due effect with his class. One of the men, who had always had a foible for humanity, took

advantage of the prevailing mood in another man, and wrought upon him to ask, among the fellows he was

asking to a tea at his rooms, several fellows who were distinctly and almost typically jay. The tea was for the

aunt of the man who gave it, a very pretty woman from New York, and it was so richly qualified by young

people of fashion from Boston that the infusion of the jay flavor could not spoil it, if it would not rather add

an agreeable piquancy. This college mood coincided that year with a benevolent emotion in the larger world,

from which fashion was not exempt. Society had just been stirred by the reading of a certain book, which had

then a very great vogue, and several people had been down among the wretched at the North End doing good

in a consciencestricken effort to avert the millennium which the book in question seemed to threaten. The

lady who matronized the tea was said to have done more good than you could imagine at the North End, and

she caught at the chance to meet the college jays in a spirit of Christian charity. When the man who was

going to give the tea rather sheepishly confessed what the altruistic man had got him in for, she praised him

so much that he went away feeling like the hero of a holy cause. She promised the assistance and sympathy of

After all, only one of the jays came. Not many, in fact, had been asked, and when Jeff Durgin actually

appeared, it was not known that he was both the first and the last of his kind. The lady who was matronizing

the tea recognized him, with a throe of her quickened conscience, as the young fellow whom she had met two

winters before at the studio tea which Mr. Westover had given to those queer Florentine friends of his, and

whom she had never thought of since, though she had then promised herself to do something for him. She

had then even given him some vague hints of a prospective hospitality, and she confessed her sin of omission

in a swift but graphic retrospect to one of her brave girls, while Jeff stood blocking out a space for his

stalwart bulk amid the alien elegance just within the doorway, and the host was making his way toward him,

At an earlier period of his neglect and exclusion, Jeff would not have responded to the belated overture which

had now been made him, for no reason that he could divine. But he had nothing to lose by accepting the

invitation, and he had promised the altruistic man, whom he rather liked; he did not dislike the giver of the

The brave girl whom the matron was preparing to devote to him stood shrinking with a trepidation which she

could not conceal at sight of his strange massiveness, with his rustgold hair coming down toward his thick

yellow brows and mocking blue eyes in a dense bang, and his jaw squaring itself under the rather insolent

smile of his full mouth. The matron felt that her victim teas perhaps going to fail her, when a voice at her ear

She instantly turned, and flashed out in a few inspired syllables the fact she had just imparted to her

treacherous heroine. "Do let me introduce him, Miss Lynde. I must do something for him, when he gets up to

"By all means," said the girl, who had an impulse to laugh at the rude force of Jeff's face and figure, so

disproportioned to the occasion, and she vented it at the matron's tribulation. The matron was shaking hands

with people right and left, and exchanging inaudible banalities with them. She did not know what the girl said

in answer, but she was aware that she remained near her. She had professed her joy at seeing Jeff again, when

he reached her, and she turned with him and said, "Let me present you to Miss Lynde, Mr. Durgin," and so

As Jeff had none of the anxiety for social success which he would have felt at an earlier period, he now left it

to Miss Lynde to begin the talk, or not, as she chose. He bore himself with so much indifference that she was

piqued to an effort to hold his eyes, that wandered from her to this face and that in the crowd.

Jeff ,laughed, and he now took fuller note of the slender girl who stood before him, and swayed a little

backward, in a graceful curve. He saw that she had a dull, thick complexion, with liquid eyes, set wide apart

and slanted upward slightly, and a nose that was deflected inward from the straight line; but her mouth was

He had it on his tongue to say, "Well, not unless you want to sit down on some enemy," but he did not

venture this: when it comes to daring of that sort, the boldest man is commonly a little behind a timid woman.

Several of the fellows had clubbed their rooms, and lent them to the man who was giving the tea; he used one

of the apartments for a cloakroom, and he meant the other for the social overflow from his own. But people

always prefer to remain dammedup together in the room where they are received, and Miss Lynde looked

between the neighboring heads, and over the neighboring shoulders, and saw the borrowed apartment quite

empty. At the moment of this discovery the host came fighting his way up to make sure that Jeff had been

provided for in the way of introductions. He promptly introduced him to Miss Lynde. She said: "Oh, that's

been done! Can't you think of something new?" Jeff liked the style of this. "I don't mind it, but I'm afraid Mr.

"Oh, well, do something original yourself, then, Miss Lynde!" said the host. "Start a movement for that room

across the passage; that's mine, too, for the occasion; and save some of these people's lives. It's suffocating in

"Oh, I know he's just dying to have you save it," said the host, and he left them, to inspire other people to

follow their example. But such as glanced across the passage into the overflow room seemed to think it now

the possession solely of the pioneers of the movement. At any rate, they made no show of joining them; and

after Miss Lynde and Jeff had looked at the pictures on the walls and the photographs on the mantel of the

room where they found themselves, they sat down on chairs fronting the open door and the door of the room

they had left. The windowseat would have been more to Jeff's mind, and he had proposed it, but the girl

seemed not to have heard him; she took the deep easychair in full view of the company opposite, and left

"I always like to see the pictures in a man's room," she said, with a little sigh of relief from their inspection

and a partial yielding of her figure to the luxury of the chair. "Then I know what the man is. This manI

don't know whose room it isseems to have spent a good deal of his time at the theatre."

"It used to be. I'm not spending my time anywhere just now." She looked questioningly, and he added, " I

"And are you consumed with the melancholy that seems to be balling up all the men at the prospect of having

"No, you don't. And you don't feel it? You're not trying concealment, and so forth?"

"No; if I'd had my own way, I'd have left Harvard before this." He could see that his bold assumption of

difference, or indifference, told upon her. "I couldn't get out into the hard, cold world too soon."

He had hoped to startle her, but she asked, rather quietly, "What do you mean?" and she added, as if to punish

him for trying to mystify her: "I've heard that it requires gifts for that. Isn't there some proverb?"

"Yes. But I'm going to try to do it on experience." He laughed, and he did not mind her trying to hit him, for

"For three generations," he returned, with a gravity that mocked her from his bold eyes.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," she said, indifferently. "Where is your hotel? In BostonNew

She looked away from him toward the other room. "There's my brother. I didn't know he was coming."

"Shall I go and tell him where you are?" Jeff asked, following the direction of her eyes.

"No, no; he can find me," said the girl, sinking back in her chair again. He left her to resume the talk where

"I don't know as it's that, exactly. My grandfather used to keep a country tavern, and so it's in the blood, but

the hotel I mean is something that we've worked up into from a farm boardinghouse."

"And so," she prompted, "you're going to turn it into a hotel when you've got out of Harvard."

"It's a hotel already, and a pretty big one; but I'm going to make the right kind of hotel of it when I take hold

"It might, but we've got to spend the time somehow. You could begin, and then if I couldn't stand it you could

"It's easier to stop first and begin some other time. I guess I'll let you imagine my hotel, Miss Lynde."

"Oh, I understand now," said the girl. "The table will be the great thing. You will stuff people."

Jeff laughed with mounting pleasure in her audacity, that imparted a sense of tolerance for him such as he had

experienced very seldom from the Boston girls he had met; after all, he had met but few. It flattered him to

have her doubt what he had told her in his reckless indifference; it implied that he was fit for better things

"Well, I will. Do you really want to know what I'm going to do when I get through?"

"Let me see!" Miss Lynde leaned forward, with her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, and softly

kicked the edge of her skirt with the toe of her shoe, as if in deep thought. Jeff waited for her to play her

"Yes, everybody has an aunteven when they haven't a mother, if you can believe the Gilbert operas. I ask

because I happen to live with my aunt, and if you knew her she mightask you to call." Miss Lynde scanned

"Would you, really?" said the girl. "I've half a mind to try. I wonder if you'd really have the courage."

"No; that's the worst of it. If she were, I should introduce you, just to see if you'd dare. Well, some other time

"Then I must go." She jumped to her feet, and faced about for a glimpse of herself in the little glass on the

mantel, and put her hand on the large pink roses massed at her waist. One heavy bud dropped from its stem to

the floor, where, while she stood, the edge of her skirt pulled and pushed it. She moved a little aside to peer

over at a photograph. Jeff stooped and picked up the flower, which he offered her.

The girl removed her careless eyes from it. "When they break off so short, they won't go back."

She stopped in one of her many aversions and reversions, and looked at him steadily across her shoulder.

"Thank you. I always expected to write the circulars myself. I'll send you one."

"That would, be very pretty. But you must take me to Mrs. Bevidge, now, if you can."

"I guess I can," said Jeff; and in a minute or two they stood before the matronizing hostess, after a passage

through the babbling and laughing groups that looked as impossible after they had made it as it looked

Mrs. Bevidge gave the girl's hand a pressure distinct from the official touch of parting, and contrived to say,

for her hearing alone: "Thank you so much, Bessie. You've done missionary work."

"It will do for you to say so! He wasn't really so bad, then? Thank you again, dear!"

Jeff had waited his turn. But now, after the girl had turned away, as if she had forgotten him, his eyes

followed her, and he did not know that Mrs. Bevidge was speaking to him. Miss Lynde had slimly lost herself

in the mass, till she was only a graceful tilt of hat, before she turned with a distraught air. When her eyes met

Jeff's they lighted up with a look that comes into the face when one remembers what one has been trying to

think of. She gave him a brilliant smile that seemed to illumine him from head to foot, and before it was

Then he heard Mrs. Bevidge asking something about a hall, and he was aware of her bending upon him a

look of the daring humanity that had carried her triumphantly through her good works at the North End.

He gave his number and street, and she thanked him with the benevolence that availed so much with the

lower classes. He went away thrilling and tingling, with that girl's tones in his ear, her motions in his nerves,

and the colors of her face filling his sight, which he printed on the air whenever he turned, as one does with a

When Jeff reached his room he felt the need of writing to Cynthia, with whatever obscure intention of

atonement. He told her of the college tea he had just come from, and made fun of it, and the kind of people he

had met, especially the affected girl who had tried to rattle him; he said he guessed she did not think she had

While he wrote he kept thinking how this Miss Lynde was nearer his early ideal of fashion, of high life,

which Westover had pretty well snubbed out of him, than any woman he had seen yet; she seemed a girl who

would do what she pleased, and would not be afraid if it did not please other people. He liked her having tried

to rattle him, and he smiled to himself in recalling her failure. It was as if she had laid hold of him with her

little hands to shake him, and had shaken herself. He laughed out in the dark when this image came into his

mind; its intimacy flattered him; and he believed that it was upon some hint from her that Mrs. Bevidge had

asked his address. She must be going to ask him to her house, and very soon, for it was part of Jeff's meagre

social experience that this was the way swells did; they might never ask you twice, but they would ask you

The thing that Mrs. Bevidge asked Jeff to, when her note reached him the second day after the tea, was a

meeting to interest young people in the work at the North End, and Jeff swore under his breath at the

disappointment and indignity put upon him. He had reckoned upon an afternoon tea, at least, or even, in the

flights of fancy which he now disowned to himself, a dance after the MidYears, or possibly an earlier

reception of some sort. He burned with shame to think of a theatre party, which he had fondly specialized,

He tore Mrs. Bevidge's note to pieces, and decided not to answer it at all, as the best way of showing how he

had taken her invitation. But Mrs. Bevidge's benevolence was not wanting in courage; she believed that Jeff

should pay his footing in society, such as it was, and should allow himself to be made use of, the first thing;

when she had no reply from him, she wrote him again, asking him to an adjourned meeting of the first

convocation, which had been so successful in everything but numbers. This time she baited her hook, in

hoping that the young men would feel something of the interest the young ladies had already shown in the

matter. She expressed the fear that Mr. Durgin had not got her earlier letter, and she sent this second to the

Jeff's resentment was now so far past that he would have civilly declined to go to the woman's house; but all

his hopes of seeing that girl, as he always called Miss Lynde in his thought, were revived by the mention of

the young ladies interested in the cause. He accepted, though all the way into Boston he laid wagers with

himself that she would not be there; and up to the moment of taking her hand he refused himself any hope of

There was not much business before the meeting; that had really been all transacted before; it was mainly to

make sure of the young men, who were present in the proportion of one to five young ladies at least. Mrs.

Bevidge explained that she had seen the wastefulness of amateur effort among the poor, and announced that

hereafter she was going to work with the established charities. These were very much in want of visitors,

especially young men, to go about among the applicants for relief, and inquire into their real necessities, and

get work for them. She was hers self going to act as secretary for the meetings during the coming month, and

apparently she wished to signalize her accession to the regular forces of charity by bringing into camp as

But Jeff had not come to be made use of, or as a jay who was willing to work for his footing in society. He

had come in the hope of meeting Miss Lynde, and now that he had met her he had no gratitude to Mrs.

Bevidge as a means, and no regret for the defeat of her good purposes so far as she intended their fulfilment

in him. He was so cool and selfpossessed in excusing himself, for reasons that he took no pains to make

seem unselfish, that the altruistic man who had got him asked to the college tea as a friendless jay felt it laid

"She means well, and she's very much in earnest, in this work; but I must say she can make herself very

offensivewhen she doesn't try! She has a right to ask our help, but not to parade us as the captives of her

"Oh, that's all right," said Jeff. He perceived that the amiable fellow was claiming for all an effect that Jeff

knew really implicated himself alone. "I couldn't load up with anything of that sort, if I'm to work off my

"Are you in that boat?" said the altruist, as if he were, too; and he put his hand compassionately on Jeff's iron

shoulder, and left him to Miss Lynde, whose side he had not stirred from since he had found her.

"It seems to me," she said, "that where there are so many of you in the same boat, you might manage to get

"Yes, or all go down together." Jeff laughed, and ate Mrs. Bevidge's breadandbutter, and drank her tea,

with a relish unaffected by his refusal to do what she asked him. He was right, perhaps, and perhaps she

deserved nothing better at his hands, but the altruist, when he glanced at him from the other side of the room,

He went away in a halo of young ladies; several of the other girls grouped themselves in their departure; and

it happened that Miss Lynde and Jeff took leave together. Mrs. Bevidge said to her, with the caressing

tenderness of one in the same set, "Goodbye, dear!" To Jeff she said, with the cold conscience of those

"Oh, thank you," said Jeff. He understood what the words and the manner meant together, but both were

instantly indifferent to him when he got outside and found that Miss Lynde was not driving. Something,

which was neither look, nor smile, nor word, of course, but nothing more at most than a certain pull and tilt

of the shoulder, as she turned to walk away from Mrs. Bevidge's door, told him from her that he might walk

It was one of the pink evenings, dry and clear, that come in the Boston December, and they walked down the

sidehill street, under the delicate tracery of the elm boughs in the face of the metallic sunset. In the section of

the Charles that the perspective of the street blocked out, the wrinkled current showed as if glazed with the

hard color. Jeff's strong frame rejoiced in the cold with a hale pleasure when he looked round into the face of

the girl beside him, with the gray film of her veil pressed softly against her red mouth by her swift advance.

Their faces were nearly on a level, as they looked into each other's eyes, and he kept seeing the play of the

"Why sha'n't you go to Mrs. Bevidge's Thursdays?" she asked. "They're very nice."

"Well, I do advise you to go," said the girl. Shall you be there next Thursday?"

"Touche," said Jeff, and they both laughed. "Can you always get in at an enemy that way?"

"I'm not sure you could." For an instant Jeff did not feel the point, and he had not the magnanimity, when he

did, to own himself touched again. Apparently, if this girl could not rattle him, she could beat him at fence,

and the will to dominate her began to stir in him. If he could have thought of any sarcasm, no matter how

crushing, he would have come back at her with it. He could not think of anything, and he walked at her side,

"When they reached her door there was a young man at the lock with a latchkey, which he was not making

work, for, after a bated blasphemy of his failure, he turned and twitched the bell impatiently.

Miss Lynde laughed provokingly, and he looked over his shoulder at her and at Jeff, who felt his injury

increased by the disadvantage this young man put him at. Jeff was as correctly dressed; he wore a silk hat of

the last shape, and a long frockcoat; he was properly gloved and shod; his clothes fitted him, and were from

the best tailor; but at sight of this young man in clothes of the same design he felt illdressed. He was in like

sort aware of being rudely blocked out physically, and coarsely colored as to his blond tints of hair and eye

and cheek. Even the sinister something in the young man's look had distinction, and there was style in the

signs of dissipation in his handsome face which Jeff saw with a hunger to outdo him.

Miss Lynde said to Jeff, "My brother, Mr. Durgin," and then she added to the other, "You ought to ring first,

"The key's all right," said the young man, without paying any attention to Jeff beyond a glance of recognition;

His sister suggested, with an amiability which Jeff felt was meant in reparation to him, " Perhaps a night latch

never works before darkor very well before midnight." The door was opened, and she said to Jeff, with

Jeff excused himself, for he perceived that her politeness was not so much an invitation to him as a defiance

to her brother; he gave her credit for no more than it was worth, and he did not wish any the less to get even

At dinner, in the absence of the butler, Alan Lynde attacked his sister across the table for letting herself be

seen with a jay, who was not only a jay, but a cad, and personally so offensive to most of the college men that

he had never got into a decent club or society; he had been suspended the first year, and if he had not had the

densest kind of cheek he would never have come back. Lynde said he would like to know where she had

She answered that she had picked him up, if that was the phrase he liked, at Mrs. Bevidge's; and then Alan

swore a little, so as not to be heard by their aunt, who sat at the head of the table, and looked down its length

between them, serenely ignorant, in her slight deafness, of what was going on between them. To her

perception Alan was no more vehement than usual, and Bessie no more smilingly selfcontained. He said he

supposed that it was some more of Lancaster's damned missionary work, then, and he wondered that a

gentleman like Morland had ever let Lancaster work such a jay in on him; he had seen her 'afficher' herself

with the fellow at Morland's tea; he commanded her to stop it; and he professed to speak for her good.

Bessie returned that she knew how strongly he felt from the way he had misbehaved when she introduced

him to Mr. Durgin, but that she supposed he had been at the club and his nerves were unstrung. Was that the

reason, perhaps, why he could not make his latchkey work? Mr. Durgin might be a cad, and she would not

say he was not a jay, but so far he had not sworn at her; and, if he had been suspended and come back, there

were some people who had not been suspended or come back, either, though that might have been for want of

She ended by declaring she was used to going into society without her brother's protection, or even his

company, and she would do her best to get on without his advice. Or was it his conduct he wished her to

It had come to the fish going out by this time, and Alan, who had eaten with no appetite, and drunken

Bessie shrugged, but she said, presently, with her lips more than her voice: "I don't think he feels very well."

The girl frowned assent, and the meal went on to its end. Then she and her aunt went into the large, dull

library, where they passed the evenings which Bessie did not spend in some social function. These evenings

were growing rather more frequent, with her advancing years, for she was now nearly twentyfive, and there

were few Seniors so old. She was not the kind of girl to renew her youth with the Sophomores and Freshmen

in the classes succeeding the class with which she had danced through college; so far as she had kept up the

old relation with students, she continued it with the men who had gone into the lawschool. But she saw less

and less of these without seeing more of other men, and perhaps in the last analysis she was not a favorite.

She was allowed to be fascinating, but she was not felt to be flattering, and people would rather be flattered

than fascinated. In fact, the men were mostly afraid of her; and it has been observed of girls of this kind that

the men who are not afraid of them are such as they would do well to be afraid of. Whether that was quite the

case with Bessie Lynde or not, it was certain that she who was always the cleverest girl in the room, and if

not the prettiest, then the most effective, had not the best men about her. Her men were apt to be those whom

the other girls called stupid or horrid, and whom it would not be easy, though it might be more just, to

classify otherwise. The other girls wondered what she could see in them; but perhaps it was not necessary that

she should see anything in them, if they could see all she wished them to see, and no more, in her.

The room where tea was now brought and put before her was volumed round by the collections of her

grandfather, except for the spaces filled by his portrait and that of earlier ancestors, going back to the time

when Copley made masterpieces of his fellowBostonians. Her aunt herself looked a family portrait of the

middle period, a little anterior to her father's, but subsequent to her greatgrandfather's. She had a comely

face, with large, smooth cheeks and prominent eyes; the edges of her decorous brown wig were combed

rather near their corners, and a fitting cap palliated but did not deny the wig. She had the quiet but rather dull

look of people slightly deaf, and she had perhaps been stupefied by a life of unalloyed prosperity and

propriety. She had grown an old maid naturally, but not involuntarily, and she was without the sadness or the

harshness of disappointment. She had never known much of the world, though she had always lived in it. She

knew that it was made up of two kinds of peoplepeople who were like her and people who were not like

her; and she had lived solely in the society of people who were like her, and in the shelter of their opinions

and ideals. She did not contemn or exclude the people who were unlike her, but she had never had any more

contact with them than she now had with the weather of the streets, as she sat, filling her large armchair full

of her ladylike correctness, in the library of the handsome house her father had left her. The irruption of her

brother's son and daughter into its cloistered quiet had scarcely broken its invulnerable order. It was right and

fit they should be there after his death, and it was not strange that in the course of time they should both show

certain unregulated tendencies which, since they were not known to be Lynde tendencies, must have been

derived from the Southwestern woman her brother had married during his social and financial periclitations

in a region wholly inconceivable to her. Their mother was dead, too, and their aunt's life closed about them

with full acceptance, if not complacence, as part of her world. They had grown to manhood and womanhood

without materially discomposing her faith in the oldfashioned Unitarian deity, whose service she had always

When Alan left college in his Freshman year, and did not go back, but went rather to Europe and Egypt and

Japan, it appeared to her myopic optimism that his escapades had been pretty well hushed up by time and

distance. After he came home and devoted himself to his club, she could have wished that he had taken up

some profession or business; but since there was money enough, she waited in no great disquiet until he

showed as decided a taste for something else as he seemed for the present to have only for horses. In the

mean while, from time to time, it came to her doctor's advising his going to a certain retreat. But he came out

the first time so much better and remained well so long that his aunt felt a kind of security in his going again

and again, whenever he became at all worse. He always came back better. As she took the cup of tea that

Bessie poured out for her, she recurred to the question that she had partly asked already:

"Not so very much," said the girl, candidly. "He's been at the club, I suppose, but he left the table partly

Her aunt tasted her tea, and found it so quite what she liked that she said, from a natural satisfaction with

"Well," returned Bessie, and she got her pretty voice to the level of her aunt's hearing, with some straining,

and kept it there, "when he is in that state, he has to scold some one; and I had been rather annoying, I

"What had you been doing?" asked her aunt, making out her words more from the sight than from the sound,

"I had been walking home with a jay, and we found Alan trying to get in at the front door with his key, and I

Miss Louisa Lynde had heard the word so often from her niece and nephew, that she imagined herself in full

"I met him first," said the girl, "at Willie Morland's tea, last week, and today I found him at Mrs. Bevidge's

"I didn't know," said her aunt, after a momentary attention to her tea, "that jays were interested in that sort of

The girl laughed. "I believe they're not. It hasn't quite reached them, yet; and I don't think it will ever reach

my jay. Mrs. Bevidge tried to work him into the cause, but he refused so promptly, and so intelligently,

don't you knowand so almost brutally, that poor Freddy Lancaster had to come and apologize to him for

her want of tact." Bessie enjoyed the fact, which she had colored a little, in another laugh, but she had

apparently not possessed her aunt of the humor of it. She remained seriouslyattentive, and the girl went on:

"He was not the least abashed at having refused; he stayed till the last, and as we came out together and he

was going my way, I let him walk home with me. He's a jay, but he isn't a common jay." Bessie leaned

forward and tried to implant some notion of Jeff's character and personality in her aunt's mind.

Miss Lynde listened attentively enough, but she merely asked, when all was said: "And why was Alan vexed

"Well," said the girl, falling back into her chair, "generally because this man's a jay, and particularly because

he's been rather a baddish jay, I believe. He was suspended in his first year for something or other, and you

know poor Alan's very particular! But Molly Enderby says Freddy Lancaster gives him the best of characters

now." Bessie pulled down her mouth, with an effect befitting the notion of repentance and atonement. Then

she flashed out: "Perhaps he had been drinking when he got into trouble. Alan could never forgive him for

"I think," said her aunt, "it is to your brother's credit that he is anxious about your associations."

"Oh, very much!" shouted Bessie, with a burst of laughter. " And as he isn't practically so, I ought to have

been more patient with his theory. But when he began to scold me I lost my temper, and I gave him a few

wholesome truths in the guise of taunts. That was what made him go away, I suppose."

"But I don't really see," her aunt pursued,"what occasion he had to be angry with you in this instance."

"Oh, I do!" said Bessie. "Mr. Durgin isn't one to inspire the casual beholder with the notion of his spiritual

distinction. His face is so rude and strong, and he has such a primitive effect in his clothes, that you feel as if

you were coming down the street with a prehistoric man that the barbers and tailors had put a 'fin de siecle'

surface on." At the mystification which appeared in her aunt's face the girl laughed again. "I should have been

quite as anxious, if I had been in Alan's place, and I shall tell him so, sometime. If I had not been so

interested in the situation I don't believe I could have kept my courage. Whenever I looked round, and found

that prehistoric man at my elbow, it gave me the creeps, a little, as if he were really carrying me off to his

The ladies finished their tea, and the butler came and took the cups away. Miss Lynde remained silent in her

chair at her end of the library table, and byandby Bessie got a book and began to read. When her aunt

"I don't think he's been out," said the girl. "It isn't late enough for him to come inor early enough."

Bessie did not smile at a comedy which was apt to be repeated every evening that she and her aunt spent at

home together; they parted for the night with the decencies of family affection, and Bessie delivered the elder

lady over to her maid. Then the girl sank down again, and lay musing in her deep chair before the fire with

her book shut on her thumb. She looked rather old and worn in her reverie; her face lost the air of gay banter

which, after the beauty of her queer eyes and her vivid mouth, was its charm. The eyes were rather dull now,

She was waiting for her brother to come down, as he was apt to do if he was in the house, after their aunt

went to bed, to smoke a cigar in the library. He was in his house shoes when he shuffled into the room, but

her ear had detected his presence before a hiccough announced it. She did not look up, but let him make

several failures to light his cigar, and damn the matches under his breath, before she pushed the droplight to

him in silent suggestion. As he leaned over her chairback to reach its chimney with his cigar in his mouth,

He waited till he got round to his aunt's easychair and dropped into it before he answered, "So are you,

"I'm not so sure of that," said the girl, " as I should be if you were still scolding me. I knew that he was a jay,

"Oh yes, you do, Alan. You mustn't be logical! You might as well say you can't understand how you came to

be more serious than sober." The brother laughed helplessly. "It was the excitement."

"But you can't give way to that sort of thing, Bess," said her brother, with the gravity of a man feeling the

"I know I can't, but I do," she returned. "I know it's bad for me, if it isn't for other people. Come! I'll swear off

"I'm always ready, to swear off," said the young man, gloomily. He added, "But you've got brains, Bess, and I

"Do you really, Alan?" asked the girl, pleased perhaps as much by his reproach as by his praise. "Do you

"Oh, I didn't mean to ask so much as that! But what's the reason I can't do anything with them? Other girls

draw, and play, and write. I don't do anything but go in for the excitement that's bad for me. I wish you'd

Alan Lynde did not try. The question seemed to turn his thoughts back upon himself to dispiriting effect.

"Lots of them!" cried his sister, generously. "There isn't any of the men to compare with you. If I had you to

talk with all the time, I shouldn't want jays. I don't mean to flatter. You're a constant feast of reason; I don't

care for flows of soul. You always take right views of things when you're yourself, and even when you're

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye with a smile at once rueful and comic.

"'Touche',' Mr. Durgin says. He fences, it seems, and he speaks French. It was like an animal speaking

French; you always expect them to speak English. But I don't mind your swearing before me; I know that it

"Yes, a good deal," said Bessie, with an air of thoughtfulness; and then she went on to tell all that Jeff had

told her of himself, and she described his aplomb in dealing with the benevolent Bevidge, as she called her,

and sketched his character, as it seemed to her. The sketch was full of shrewd guesses, and she made it

amusing to her brother, who from the vantage of his own baddishness no doubt judged the original more

"Yes," she pensively assented. "I suppose it's as if you took to some very common kind of whiskey, isn't it? I

She turned upon him a look of that keen but limited knowledge which renders women's conjectures of evil

"Yes, I know that," she admitted, and she lay back in her chair, looking dreamily into the fire. After a while

"Then it's a bargain," she said. She jumped from her chair and went over to him, and smoothed his hair over

his forehead and kissed the place she had smoothed, though it was unpleasantly damp to her lips. "Poor boy,

poor boy! Now, remember! No more jays for me, and no more jags for you. Goodnight."

Her brother broke into a wild laugh at her slanging, which had such a bizarre effect in relation to her physical

Jeff did not know whether Miss Bessie Lynde meant to go to Mrs. Bevidge's Thursdays or not. He thought

she might have been bantering him by what she said, and he decided that he would risk going to the first of

them on the chance of meeting her. She was not there, and there was no one there whom he knew. Mrs.

Bevidge made no effort to enlarge his acquaintance, and after he had drunk a cup of her tea he went away

with rage against society in his heart, which he promised himself to vent at the first chance of refusing its

favors. But the chance seemed not to come. The world which had opened its gates to him was fast shut again,

and he had to make what he could of renouncing it. He worked pretty hard, and he renewed himself in his

fealty to Cynthia, while his mind strayed curiously to that other girl. But he had almost abandoned the hope

of meeting her again, when a large party was given on the eve of the Harvard MidYear Examinations, which

end the younger gayeties of Boston, for a fortnight at least, in January. The party was so large that the

invitations overflowed the strict bounds of society at some points. In the case of Jeff Durgin the excess was

intentional beyond the vague benevolence which prompted the giver of the party to ask certain other

outsiders. She was a lady of a soul several sizes larger than the souls of some other society leaders; she was

not afraid to do as she liked; for instance, she had not only met the Vostrands at Westover's tea, several years

before, but she had afterward offered some hospitalities to those ladies which had discharged her whole duty

toward them without involving her in any disadvantages. Jeff had been presented to her at Westover's, but she

disliked him so promptly and decidedly that she had left him out of even the things that she asked some other

jays to, like lectures and parlor readings for good objects. It was not until one of her daughters met him, first

at Willie Morland's tea and then at Mrs. Bevidge's meeting, that her social conscience concerned itself with

him. At the first her daughter had not spoken to him, as might very well have happened, since Bessie Lynde

had kept him away with her nearly all the time; but at the last she had bowed pleasantly to him across the

room, and Jeff had responded with a stiff obeisance, whose coldness she felt the more for having been

"I think he was hurt, mamma," the girl explained to her mother, "that you've never had him to anything. I

"Oh, well, send him a card, then," said her mother; and when Jeff got the card, rather near the eleventh hour,

he made haste to accept, not because he cared to go to Mrs. Enderby's house, but because he hoped he should

Bessie was the first person he met after he turned from paying his duty to the hostess. She was with her aunt,

and she presented him, and promised him a dance, which she let him write on her card. She sat out another

To Westover, who had gone with the increasing forlornness a man feels in such pleasures after thirtyfive, it

seemed as if the two were in each other's company the whole evening. The impression was so strong with

him that when Jeff restored Bessie to her aunt for the dance that was to be for some one else, and came back

to the supperroom, the painter tried to satisfy a certain uneasiness by making talk with him. But Jeff would

not talk; he got away with a bottle of champagne, which he had captured, and a plate heaped with croquettes

and pease, and galantine and salad. There were no ladies left in the room by that time, and few young men;

but the oldsters crowded the place, with their bald heads devoutly bowed over their victual, or their frosty

mustaches bathed in their drink, singly or in groups; the noise of their talk and laughter mixed with the sound

of their eating and drinking, and the clash of the knives and dishes. Over their stooped shoulders and past

their rounded stomachs Westover saw Alan Lynde vaguely making his way with a glass in his hand, and

looking vaguely about for wine; he saw Jeff catch his wandering eye, and make offer of his bottle, and then

saw Lynde, after a moment of haughty pause, unbend and accept it. His thin face was flushed, and his hair

tossed over his forehead, but Jeff seemed not to take note of that. He laughed boisterously at something

Lynde said, and kept filling his glass for him. His own color remained clear and cool. It was as if his

Westover wanted to interfere, and so far as Jeff was concerned he would not have hesitated; but Lynde was

concerned, too, and you cannot save such a man from himself without offence. He made his way to the young

Jeff held up the bottle, and called to him, "Get yourself a glass, Mr. Westover." He put on the air of a host,

and would hardly be denied. "Know Mr. Westover, Mr. Lynde? Just talking about you," he explained to

Alan had to look twice at the painter. "Oh yes. Mr. Durgin, here telling me about his place in the

mountains. Says you've been there. Goinggoing myself in the summer. See hishorses." He made pauses

Westover believed Lynde understood Jeff to be a country gentleman of sporting tastes, and he would not let

"Strictlytemperance, I suppose?" said Alan, trying to smile with lips that obeyed him stiffly. He appeared

not to care who or what Jeff was; the champagne had washed away all difference between them. He went on

to say that he had heard of Jeff's intention of running the hotel himself when he got out of Harvard. He held it

Jeff filled his glass; Alan looked at it, faltered, and then drank it off. The talk began again between the young

men, but it left Westover out, and he had to go away. Whether Jeff was getting Lynde beyond himself from

the love of mischief, such as had prompted him to tease little children in his boyhood, or was trying to

ingratiate himself with the young fellow through his weakness, or doing him harm out of mere

thoughtlessness, Westover came away very unhappy at what he had seen. His unhappiness connected itself so

distinctly with Lynde's family that he went and sat down beside Miss Lynde from an obscure impulse of

compassion, and tried to talk with her. It would not have been so hard if she were merely deaf, for she had the

skill of deaf people in arranging the conversation so that a nodded yes or no would be all that was needed to

carry it forward. But to Westover she was terribly dull, and he was gasping, as in an exhausted receiver, when

Bessie came up with a smile of radiant recognition for his extremity. She got rid of her partner, and devoted

herself at once to Westover. "How good of you!" she said, without giving him the pain of an awkward

"Yes," she said, " I am looking rather well, tonight; but don't you think effective would have been a better

word?" She smiled across her aunt at him out of a cloud of pink, from which her thin shoulders and slender

neck emerged, and her arms, gloved to the top, fell into her lap; one of them seemed to terminate naturally in

"I will say effective, too, if you insist," said Westover. "But at the same time you're the most beautiful person

"How lovely of you, even if you don't mean it," she sighed. "If girls could have more of those things said to

Westover laughed. "We might organize a societythey have them for nearly everything nowfor saying

"But it ought to be done conscientiously, and you couldn't go round telling every one that she was the most

"Oh yes; that! But you could vary it so as to save your conscience. You could say, 'How divinely you're

looking!' or 'How angelic!' or 'You're the very poetry of motion,' or 'You are grace itself,' or 'Your gown is a

perfect dream, or any little commonplace, and every one would take it for praise of her personal appearance,

and feel herself a great beauty, just as I do now, though I know very well that I'm all out of drawing, and just

"I couldn't allow any one but you to say that, Miss Bessie; and I only let it pass because you say it so well."

"Yes; you're always so good! You wouldn't contradict me even when you turned me out of your class."

"Not just in so many words, but when I said I couldn't do anything in art, you didn't insist that it was because

I wouldn't, and of course then I had to go. I've never forgiven you, Mr. Westover, never! Do keep on talking

very excitedly; there's a man coming up to us that I don't want to think I see him, or he'll stop. There! He's

"Ah, Miss Bessie," said the painter; delighted at her drama, "there isn't anything you couldn't do if you

"You mean parlor entertainments; impersonations; impressions; that sort of thing? I have thought of it. But it

"Well, being very, very good. I want something that would really tax my powers. I should like to be an

example. I tried it the other night just before I went to sleep, and it was fine. I became an example to others.

But when I woke upI went on in the old way. I want something hard, don't you know; but I want it to be

She laughed, and Westover said: "I am glad you're not serious. No one ought to be an example to others. To

"It certainly isn't so agreeable to the object," said the girl. "But it's fine for the subject as long as it lasts. How

metaphysical we're getting! The objective and the subjective. It's quite what I should expect of talk at a

Boston dance if I were a NewYorker. Have you seen anything of my brother, within the last hour or so, Mr.

"Yes; I just left him in the supperroom. Shall I go get him for you?" When he had said this, with the notion

of rescuing him from Jeff, Westover was sorry, for he doubted if Alan Lynde were any longer in the state to

"No, no. He'll look us up in the course of the eveningor the morning." A young fellow came to claim her

for a dance, and Westover had not the face to leave Miss Lynde, all the less because she told him he must not

think of staying. He stayed till the dance was over, and Bessie came back to him.

Bessie sank back in her chair with an air of nervous collapse, and did not say anything. Westover saw her

watching the young couples who passed in and out of the room where the dancing was, or found corners on

sofas, or windowseats, or sheltered spaces beside the doors and the chimney piece, the girls panting and

the men leaning forward to fan them. She looked very tired of it; and when a young fellow came up and

asked her to dance, she told him that she was provisionally engaged. "Come back and get me, if you can't do

better," she said, and he answered there was no use trying to do better, and said he would wait till the other

man turned up, or didn't, if she would let him. He sat down beside her, and some young talk began between

In the midst of it Jeff appeared. He looked at Westover first, and then approached with an embarrassed face.

Bessie got vividly to her feet. "No apologies, Mr. Durgin, please! But in just another moment you'd have last

Westover saw what he believed a change pass in Jeff's look from embarrassment to surprise and then to

flattered intelligence. He beamed all over; and he went away with Bessie toward the ballroom, and left

Westover to a wholly unsupported belief that she had not been engaged to dance with Jeff. He wondered what

her reckless meaning could be, but he had always thought her a young lady singularly fitted by nature and art

to take care of herself, and when he reasoned upon what was in his mind he had to own that there was no

He took leave of Miss Lynde, and was going to get his coat and hat for his walk home when he was

mysteriously stopped in a corner of the stairs by one of the caterer's men whom he knew. It is so unnatural to

be addressed by a servant at all unless he asks you if you will have something to eat or drink, that Westover

was in a manner prepared to have him say something startling. "It's about young Mr. Lynde, sor. We've got

um in one of the rooms upstairs, but he ain't fit to go home alone, and I've been lookin' for somebody that

knows the family to help get um into a car'ge. He won't go for anny of us, sor."

"Where is he?" asked Westover, in anguish at being unable to refuse the appeal, but loathing the office put

"I'll show you, sor," said the caterer's man, and he sprang up the stairs before Westover, with glad alacrity.

In a little room at the side of that where the men's hats and coats were checked, Alan Lynde sat drooping

forward in an armchair, with his head fallen on his breast. He roused himself at the flash of the burner which

the man turned up. "What's all this?" he demanded, haughtily. "Where's the carriage? What's the matter?"

"Your carriage is waiting, Lynde," said Westover. "I'll see you down to it," and he murmured, hopelessly, to

But Lynde called out, defiantly: "Back way; I sha'n't go down back way. Inshult to guest. I

"I'm Westover, Lynde," the painter began, but the young fellow broke in upon him, shaking his hand and then

"Oh, Westover! All right! I'll go down back way with you. Thought thought it was damn caterer's man.

"No. It's all right. "Westover got his arm under Lynde's elbow, and, with the man going before for them to

fall upon jointly in case they should stumble, he got him down the dark and twisting stairs and through the

basement hall, which was vaguely haunted by the dispossessed women servants of the family, and so out

"Call Miss Lynde's car'ge," shouted the caterer's man to the barker, and escaped back into the basement,

It seemed a publication of the wretch's shame when the barker began to fill the night with hoarse cries of,

"Miss Lynde's carriage; carriage for Miss Lynde!" The cries were taken up by a coachman here and there in

the rank of vehicles whose varnished roofs shone in the moon up and down the street. After a time that

Westover of course felt to be longer than it was, Miss Lynde's old coachman was roused from his sleep on the

box and started out of the rank. He took in the situation with the eye of custom, when he saw Alan supported

He said, "Oh, ahl right, sor!" and when the two whitegloved policemen from either side of it helped

Westover into the carriage with Lynde, he set off at a quick trot. The policemen clapped their hands together,

and smiled across the strip of carpet that separated them, and winks and nods of intelligence passed among

the barkers to the footmen about the curb and steps. There were none of them sorry to see a gentleman in that

Halfway home he roused himself and put his hand on the carriagedoor latch. "Tell the coachman drive us

"No, no," said Westover, trying to restrain him. "We'd better go right on to your house."

"Oh yesWestover. Thought we left Westover at Mrs. Enderby's. Thought it was that jayWhat's his

name? Durgin. He's awful jay, but civil to me, and I want be civil to him. You're notjay? No? That's right.

Fellow made me sick; but I took his champagne; and I must show him some attention." He released the

doorhandle, and fell back against the cushioned carriage wall. "He's a blackguard!" he said, sourly. "Not

simple jayblackguard, too. Nonobusiness bring in my sister's name, hey? Youyou say

it'sWestover? Oh yes, Westover. Old friend of family. Tell you good joke, Westovermy sister's. No

more jays for me, no more jags for you. That's what she sayjust between her and me, you know; she's a

lady, Bess is; knows when to useslang. Markmark of a lady know when to use slang. Pretty goodjays

When the carriage pulled up before Miss Lynde's house, Westover opened the door. "You're at home, now,

Lynde did not stir. He asked Westover again who he was, and when he had made sure of him, he said, with

dignity, Very well; now they must get the other fellow. Westover entreated; he even reasoned; Lynde lay

Westover thought of pulling him up and getting him indoors by main force. He appealed to the coachman to

"Why, you see, I couldn't leave me harsses, sor," said the coachman. "What's he wants, sor?" He bent

urbanely down from his box and listened to the explanation that Westover made him, standing in the cold on

the curbstone, with one hand on the carriage door. "Then it's no use, sor," the man decided. "Whig" he's that

way, ahl hell couldn't stir um. Best go back, sor, and try to find the gentleman."

This was in the end what Westover had to do, feeling all the time that a thing so frantically absurd could not

be a waking act, but helpless to escape from its performance. He thought of abandoning his charge and

leaving him, to his fate when he opened the carriage door before Mrs. Enderby's house; but with the next

thought he perceived that this was on all accounts impossible. He went in, and began his quest for Jeff,

sending various serving" men about with vague descriptions of him, and asking for him of departing guests,

He had to take off his overcoat at last, and reappear at the ball. The crowd was still great, but visibly less

dense than it had been. By a sudden inspiration he made his way to the supperroom, and he found Jeff there,

filling a plate, as if he were about to carry it off somewhere. He commanded Jeff's instant presence in the

Jeff leaned back against the wall with the plate in his hand and laughed till it half slipped from his hold.

When he could get his breath, he said: "I'll be back in a few minutes; I've got to take this to Miss Bessie

Westover hardly believed him. But when he got on his own things again, Jeff joined him in his hat and

It was another carriage that stopped the way now, and once more the barker made the night ring with what

Westover felt his heartless and shameless cries for Miss Lynde's carriage. After a maddening delay, it lagged

"Nobody there?" cried Westover, and they fell upon the coachman with wild question and reproach,; the

policeman had to tell him at last that the carriage must move on, to make way for others.

The coachman had no explanation to offer: he did not know how or when Mr. Alan had got away.

"But you can give a guess where he's gone?" Jeff suggested, with a presence of mind which Westover mutely

"Well, that will do; take me there," said Jeff. "You go in and account for me to Miss Lynde," he instructed

Westover, across his shoulder. "I'll get him home before morning, somehow; and I'll send the carriage right

Westover had the forethought to decide that Miss Bessie should ask for Jeff if she wanted him, and this

simplified matters very much. She asked nothing about him. At sight of Westover coming up to her where

she sat with her aunt, she merely said: "Why, Mr. Westover! I thought you took leave of this scene of gayety

"Did you?" Westover returned, provisionally, and she saved him from the sin of framing some deceit in final

"Have you seen anything of Alan lately?" she asked, in a voice involuntarily lowered.

Still she did not go, and there was an interval in which she had the air of vaguely waiting. To Westover's

vision, the young people still passing to and from the ballroom were like the painted figures of a picture

quickened with sudden animation. There were scarcely any elders to be seen now, except the chaperons, who

sat in their places with iron fortitude; Westover realized that he was the only man of his age left. He felt that

the lights ought to have grown dim, but the place was as brilliant as ever. A window had been opened

somewhere, and the cold breath of the night was drawing through the heated rooms.

He was content to have Bessie stay on, though he was almost dropping with sleep, for he was afraid that if

she went at once, the carriage might not have got back, and the whole affair must somehow be given away; at

last, if she were waiting, she decided to wait no longer, and then Westover did not know how to keep her. He

saw her rise and stoop over her aunt, putting her mouth to the elder lady's ear, and he heard her saying, "I am

going home, Aunt Louisa." She turned sweetly to him. "Won't you let us set you down, Mr. Westover?"

"Why, thank you, I believe I prefer walking. But do let me have your carriage called," and again he hurried

himself into his overcoat and hat, and ran downstairs, and the barker a third time sent forth his lamentable

While he stood on the curbstone eagerly peering up and down the street, he heard, without being able either

to enjoy or resent it, one of the policemen say across him to the other, "Miss lynde seems to be doin' a

Almost at the moment a carriage drove up, and he recognized Miss Lynde's coachman, who recognized him.

"Just got back, sor," he whispered, and a minute later Bessie came daintily out over the carpeted way with her

"How good of you!" she said, and " Goodnight, Mr. Westover," said Miss Lynde, with an implication in her

voice that virtue was peculiarly its own reward for those who performed any good office for her or hers.

Westover shut them in, the carriage rolled off, and he started on his homeward walk with a long sigh of relief.

Bessie asked the sleepy man who opened her aunt's door whether her brother had come in yet, and found that

he had not. She helped her aunt off upstairs with her maid, and when she came down again she sent the man

to bed; she told him she was going to sit up and she would let her brother in. The caprices of Alan's latchkey

were known to all the servants, and the man understood what she, meant. He said he had left a light in the

receptionroom and there was a fire there; and Bessie tripped on down from the library floor, where she had

met him. She had put off her ball dress and had slipped into the simplest and easiest of breakfast frocks,

which was by no means plain. Bessie had no plain frocks for any hour of the day; her frocks all expressed in

stuff and style and color, and the bravery of their flying laces and ribbons, the audacity of spirit with which

she was herself chicqued together, as she said. This one she had on now was something that brightened her

dull complexion, and brought out the best effect of her eyes and mouth, and seemed the effluence of her

personal dash and grace. It made the most of her, and she liked it beyond all her other negligees for its

She got a book, and sat down in a long, low chair before the fire and crossed her pretty slippers on the warm

hearth. It was a quarter after three by the clock on the mantel; but she had never felt more eagerly awake. The

party had not been altogether to her mind, up to midnight, but after that it had been a series of rapid and vivid

emotions, which continued themselves still in the tumult of her nerves, and seemed to demand an indefinite

sequence of experience. She did not know what state her brother might be in when he came home; she had

not seen anything of him after she first went out to supper; till then, though, he had kept himself straight, as

he needs must; but she could not tell what happened to him afterward. She hoped that he would come home

able to talk, for she wished to talk. She wished to talk about herself; and as she had already had flattery

enough, she wanted some truth about herself; she wanted Alan to say what he thought of her behavior the

whole evening with that jay. He must have seen something of it in the beginning, and she should tell him all

the rest. She should tell him just how often she had danced with the man, and how many dances she had sat

out with him; how she had pretended once that she was engaged when another man asked her, and then

danced with the jay, to whom she pretended that he had engaged her for the dance. She had wished to see

how he would take it; for the same reason she had given to some one else a dance that was really his. She

would tell Alan how the jay had asked her for that last dance, and then never come near her again. That

would give him the whole situation, and she would know just what he thought of it.

What she thought of herself she hardly knew, or made believe she hardly knew. She prided herself upon not

being a flirt; she might not be very good, as goodness went, but she was not despicable, and a flirt was

despicable. She did not call the audacity of her behavior with the jay flirting; he seemed to understand it as

well as she, and to meet her in her own spirit; she wondered now whether this jay was really more interesting

than the other men one met, or only different; whether he was original, like Alan himself, or merely novel,

and would soon wear down to the tiresomeness that seemed to underlie them all, and made one wish to do

something dreadful. In the jay's presence she had no wish to do anything dreadful. Was it because he was

dreadful enough for both, all the time, without doing anything? She would like to ask Alan that, and see how

he would take it. Nothing seemed to put the jay out, so far as she had tried, and she had tried some bold

impertinences with him. He was very jolly through them all, and at the worst of them he laughed and asked

her for that dance, which he never came to claim, though in the mean time he brought her some belated

supper, and was devoted to her and her aunt, inventing services to do for them. Then suddenly he went off

and did not return, and Mr. Westover mysteriously reappeared, and got their carriage.

She heard a scratching at the keyhole of the outside door; she knew it was Alan's latch. She had left the

inner door ajar that there might be no uncertainty of hearing him, and she ran out into the space between that

"Is that you, Alan?" she called, softly, and if she had any doubt before, she had none when she heard her

She flung the door open, and confronted him with another man, who had his arms around him as if he had

caught him from falling with the inward pull of the door. Alan got to his feet and grappled with the man, and

Bessie saw that it was Jeff, and they stood a moment, looking at each other. Jeff tried to free himself with an

appeal to Bessie: "I beg your pardon, Miss Lynde. I walked home with your brother, and I was just helping

Alan said, with his measured distinctness: "Nobody cares what you think. Come in, and get something to

carry you over the bridge. Cambridge cars stopped running long ago. I say you shall!" He began to raise his

voice. A light flashed in a window across the way, and a sash was lifted; some one must be looking out.

"Oh, come in with him!" Bessie implored, and at a little yielding in Jeff her brother added:

Jeff made haste to shut the door behind them. He was laughing; and if it was from mere brute insensibility to

what would have shocked another in the situation, his frank recognition of its grotesqueness was of better

effect than any hopeless effort to ignore it would have been. People adjust themselves to their trials; it is the

pretence of the witness that there is no trial which hurts, and Bessie was not wounded by Jeff's laugh.

Jeff lifted Alan into the room and stayed him on foot there, while he took off his hat and overcoat, and then

he let him sink into the low easychair Bessie had just risen from. All the time, Alan was bidding her ring

and have some champagne and cold meat set out on the sideboard, and she was lightly promising and

coaxing. But he drowsed quickly in the warmth, and the last demand for supper died half uttered on his lips.

She shook her head and whispered back, "I can leave him here," and she looked at Jeff with a moment's

"Well, I guess he was pretty badly rattled." Jeff stopped himself in the vague laugh of one who remembers

"Mr. Westover had been home with him once, and he wouldn't stay. He made Mr. Westover come back for

"We went out to the carriage, as soon as I could get away from you; but he wasn't in it. I sent Mr. Westover

"That was very good of you. And Ithank you for your kindness to my brother. I shall not forget it. And I

If Bessie had meant nothing but what was fitting to the moment some inherent lightness of nature played her

false. But even the histrionic touch which she could not keep out of her voice, her manner, another sort of

"Very," she answered in kind, forgetting her brother and the whole terrible situation.

"Tell me what you thought of me," he said, and he came a little nearer to her, looking very handsome and

"And you kept your word," said Jeff. "Well, that's all right. Good nightor goodmorning, whichever it is."

He took her hand, which she could not withdraw, or feigned to herself that she could not withdraw, and

looked at her with a silent laugh, and a hardy, sceptical glance that she felt take in every detail of her

prettiness, her plainness. Then he turned and went out, and she ran quickly and locked the door upon him.

Bessie crept up to her room, where she spent the rest of the night in her chair, amid a tumult of emotion

which she would have called thinking. She asked herself the most searching questions, but she got no very

candid answers to them, and she decided that she must see the whole fact with some other's eyes before she

When she let the daylight into her room, it showed her a face in her mirror that bore no trace of conflicting

anxieties. Her complexion favored this effect of inward calm; it was always thick; and her eyes seemed to her

A smile, even, hovered on her mouth as she sat down at the breakfast table, in the pretty negligee she had

"That's always very becoming to you, Bessie," said her aunt. "It's the nicest breakfast gown you have."

"Do you think so?" Bessie looked down at it, first on one side and then on the other, as a woman always does

"Mr. Alan said he would have his breakfast in his room, miss," murmured the butler, in husky respectfulness,

as he returned to Bessie from carrying Miss Lynde's cup to her. "He don't want anything but a little toast and

She perceived that the words were meant to make it easy for her to ask: "Isn't he very well, Andrew?"

"About as usual, miss," said Andrew, a thought more sepulchral than before. "He's going onabout as

She knew this to mean that he was going on from bad to worse, and that his last night's excess was the

beginning of a debauch which could end only in one way. She must send for the doctor; he would decide

Late in the afternoon she heard Mary Enderby's voice in the reception room, bidding the man say that if

Miss Bessie were lying down she would come up to her, or would go away, just as she wished. She flew

downstairs with a glad cry of "Molly! What an inspiration! I was just thinking of you, and wishing for you.

"It's pretty early," said Miss Enderby. "But I should have been here before if I could, for I knew I shouldn't

wake you, Bessie, with your habit of turning night into day, and getting up any time in the forenoon."

"Yes, don't I? But I've been thinking about you ever since I woke, and I had to come and find out if you were

"Come upstairs and see!" said Bessie, holding her friend's hand on the sofa where they had dropped down

together, and going all over the scene of last night in that place for the thousandth time.

"How dear of you! But, Bessie, I got to thinking you'd been rather sacrificed. It came into my mind the

instant I woke, and gave me this severe case of conscience. I suppose it's a kind of conscience."

"Why, you know, Bessie, or if you don't you will presently, that it was I who got mamma to send him a card;

I felt rather sorry for him, that day at Mrs. Bevidge's, because she'd so obviously got him there to use him,

and I got mamma to ask him. Everything takes care of itself, at a large affair, and I thought I might trust in

Providence to deal with him after he came; and then I saw you made a means the whole evening! I didn't

"It's a question of Mr. Durgin?" said Bessie, coldly thrilling at the sound of a name that she pronounced so

Miss Enderby bobbed her head. "It shows that we ought never to do a good action, doesn't it? But, poor thing!

"I don't know. Was it so very bad? I'm trying to think," said Bessie, thinking that after this beginning it would

"Oh, now, Bessie! Don't you be patient, or I shall begin to lose my faith in human nature. Just say at once that

it was an outrage and I'll forgive you! You see," Miss Enderby went on, "it isn't merely that he's a jay; but he

isn't a very nice jay. None of the men like himexcept Freddy Lancaster, of course; he likes everybody, on

principle; he doesn't count. I thought that perhaps, although he's so crude and blunt, he might be sensitive and

highminded; you're always reading about such things; but they say he isn't, in the least; oh, not the least!

They say he goes with a set of fast jays, and that he's dreadful; though he has a very good mind, and could do

very well if he chose. That's what cousin Jim said today; he's just been at our house; and it was so extremely

telepathic that I thought I must run round and prevent your having the man on your conscience if you felt you

had had too much of him. You won't lay him up against us, will you?" She jumped to her feet.

"You dear!" said Bessie, keeping Mary Enderby's hand, and pressing it between both of hers against her

They were both involuntarily silent. The door had been opened to some one, and there was a brief parley,

which ended in a voice they knew to be the doctor's, saying, "Then I'll go right up to his room." Both the girls

broke into laughing adieux, to hide their consciousness that the doctor was going up to see Alan Lynde, who

Miss Enderby even said: "I was so glad to see Alan looking so well, last night."

"Yes, he had such a good time," said Bessie, and she followed her friend to the door, where she kissed her

reassuringly, and thanked her for taking all the trouble she had, bidding her not be the least anxious on her

It seemed to her that she should sink upon the stairs in mounting them to the library. Mary Enderby had told

her only what she had known before; it was what her brother had told her; but then it had not been possible

for the man to say that he had brought Alan home tipsy, and been alone in the house with her at three o'clock

in the morning. He would not only boast of it to all that vulgar comradehood of his, but it might get into those

terrible papers which published the society scandals. There would be no way but to appeal to his pity, his

generosity. She fancied herself writing to him, but he could show her note, and she must send for him to

come and see her, and try to put him on his honor. Or, that would not do, either. She must make it happen that

they should be thrown together, and then speak to him. Even that might make him think she was afraid of

him; or he might take it wrong, and believe that she cared for him. He had really been very good to Alan, and

she tried to feel safe in the thought of that. She did feel safe for a moment; but if she had meant nothing but to

make him believe her grateful, what must he infer from her talking to him in the light way she did about

forgiving him for not coming back to dance with her. Her manner, her looks, her tone, had given him the

right to say that she had been willing to flirt with him there, at that hour, and in those dreadful circumstances.

She found herself lying in a deep armchair in the library, when she was aware of Dr. Lacy pausing at the

"Come in, doctor," she said, and she knew that her face was wet with tears, and that she spoke with the voice

He came forward and looked narrowly at her, without sitting down. "There's nothing to be alarmed about,

Miss Bessie," he said. "But I think your brother had better leave home again, for a while."

The doctor had made a step backward, as if he were going away, and now he stopped. "Aren't you feeling

The doctor came forward and said, cheerily: "Let me see." He pulled a chair up to hers, and took her wrist

between his fingers. "If you were at Mrs. Enderby's last night, you'll need another night to put you just right.

But you're pretty well as it is." He let her wrist softly go, and said: "You mustn't distress yourself about your

brother's case. Of course, it's hard to have it happen now after he's held up so long; longer than it has been

before, I think, isn't it? But it's something that it has been so long. The next time, let us hope, it will be longer

The doctor made as if to rise. Bessie put her hand out to stay him. "What is it makes him do it?"

"Ah, that's a great mystery," said the doctor. "I suppose you might say the excitement."

"But it seems to me very often, in such cases, as if it were to escape the excitement. I think you're both keyed

up pretty sharply by nature, Miss Bessie," said the doctor, with the personal kindness he felt for the girl, and

The doctor laughed at such a question from a young lady, but with an inner seriousness in his laugh, as if,

coming from a patient, it was to be weighed. "Well, I suppose it isn't the habit of your sex, Miss Bessie."

"Sometimes it is. Sometimes women get drunk, and then I think they do less harm than if they did other

things to get away from the excitement." She longed to confide in him; the words were on her tongue; she

believed he could help her, tell her what to do; out of his stores of knowledge and experience he must have

some suggestion, some remedy; he could advise her; he could stand her friend, so far. People told their

doctors all kinds of things, silly things. Why should she not tell her doctor this?

It would have been easier if it had been an older man, who might have had a daughter of her age. But he was

in that period of the early forties when a doctor sometimes has a matteroffact, disagreeable wife whose

idea stands between him and the spiritual intimacy of his patients, so that it seems as if they were delivering

their confidences rather to her than to him. He was able, he was good, he was extremely acute, he was even

with the latest facts and theories; but as he sat straight up in his chair his stomach defined itself as a

halfmoon before him, and he said to the quivering heap of emotions beside him, "You mean like breaking

"Yes," she said, with a contempt that she easily hid from him, "that's worse than getting drunk, isn't it?"

"Well, it isn't so regarded," said the doctor, who supposed himself to have made a sprightly answer, and

laughed at it. "I wish, Miss Bessie, you'd take a little remedy I'm going to send you. You've merely been up

"Oh! I'll send a man to look after him tonight, and tomorrow I really think he'd better go."

Miss Lynde had gone earlier than usual to bed, when Bessie heard Alan's door open, and then heard him

feeling his way fumbingly downstairs. She surmised that he had drunk up all that he had in his room, and

She ran and got the two decantersone of whiskey and one of brandy, which he was in the habit of carrying

He came, and stood looking gloomily in from the doorway. He caught sight of the decanters and the glasses

"Come in, and shut the door, Alan," she said. "Let's make a night of it. I've got the materials here." She waved

Alan shrugged. "I don't know what you mean." But he came forward, and slouched into one of the deep

"Well, I'll tell you what," said Bessie, with a laugh. "We're both excited, and we want to get away from

ourselves. Isn't that what's the matter with you when it begins? Doctor Lacy thinks it is."

"Nothing. Merely that I'm going to drink a glass of whiskey and a glass of brandy for every glass that you

"But I'm really serious, Alan. Shall I give you something? Which shall we begin on? And we'd better begin

soon, for there's a man coming from the doctor to look after you, and then you won't get anything."

"Don't be ridiculous! Give me those decanters!" Alan struggled out of his chair, and trembled over to where

She caught them up, one in either hand, and held them as high as she could lift them. "If you don't sit down

and promise to keep still, I'll smash them both on the hearth. You know I will."

"I don't see what's got into you tonight. I don't want anything," he said. He tried to brave it out, but presently

he cast a piteous glance at the decanters where she had put them down beside her again. "Does the doctor

"It's pretty rough," he sighed. "Two glasses of that stuff would drive you so wild you wouldn't know where

"Well, I wish I didn't know where I was. I wish I wasn't anywhere." He looked at her, and then dropped his

She scanned him keenly before she answered: "Something that I should like to tell youthat you ought to

He laughed pathetically. "I don't believe I'm in a very judicial frame of mind tonight, Bess. Tomorrow"

"That's true! Well, what is it? I'll try to listen. But if you knew how my nerves were going." His eyes

He threw up his arms. " Oh well, go on. I'll listen as well as I can." He sank down in his chair and stretched

She hesitated before she began. "Do you know who brought you home last night, Alan?"

"Yes, Mr. Westover brought yon, and you wouldn't stay. You don't remember anything else?"

"Nothing for you, if you don't remember." She sat in silent hopelessness for a while, and her brother's eyes

dwelt on the decanters, which she seemed to have forgotten. "Alan!" she broke out, abruptly, "I'm worried,

The appeal in tier voice must have reached him, though he seemed scarcely to have heeded her words. "What

"You went back to the Enderbys' after Mr. Westover brought you home, and then some one else had to bring

"And I had to let him in, too. You pulled him into the house, and you made such a disturbance at the door that

"He came in with you. And you wanted him to have some supper. And you fell asleep before the fire in the

"Thatthat was the dream!" said Alan, severely. "What are you talking that stuff for, Bessie?"

"Oh no!" she retorted, with a laugh, as if the pleasure of its coming in so fitly were compensation for the

shame of the fact. "The dream was what happened afterward. The dream was that you fell asleep there, and

"You're not fit!" cried the girl. "I give it up." She got upon her feet and stood a moment listless.

"No, I'm not, Bessie. I can't pull my mind together tonight. But look here!" He seemed to lose what he wanted

"Well, then, I'll help you out. You can trust me, Bessie; you can, indeed. You don't believe it?"

"But this time you can. If you need my help I will stand by you, right or wrong. If you want to tell me now I'll

"It's just something I've got nervous about," she said, while her eyes shone with sudden tears. "But I won't

trouble you with it tonight. There's no such great hurry. We can talk about it in the morning if you're better

"No," said the young man, with pathetic dignity, "I'm not going if you need my help. But you're right about

me tonight, Bessie. I'm not fit. I'm afraid I can't grasp anything tonight. Tell me in the morning. Oh, don't be

afraid!" he cried out at the glance she gave the decanters. "That's over, now; you could put them in my hands

He rose and went toward the door. "If that doctor's man comes tonight you can send him away again. He

"All right, Alan," she said, fondly. "Goodnight. Don't worry about me. Try to get some sleep."

He came back after he got out of the room and looked in. "Bess, if you're anxious about it, if you don't feel

perfectly sure of me, you can take those things to your room with you." He indicated the decanters with a

"Oh no! I shall leave them here. It wouldn't be any use your just keeping well overnight. You'll have to keep

well a long time, Alan, if you're going to help me. And that's the reason I'd rather talk to you when you can

"Then I won't fail you, Bessie. I shall 'keep well,' as you call it, as long as you want me. Goodnight."

Bessie slept soundly, from exhaustion, and in that provisional fashion in which people who have postponed a

care to a given moment are able to sleep. But she woke early, and crept downstairs before any one else was

astir, and went to the library. The decanters stood there on the table, empty. Her brother lay a shapeless heap

Westover got home from the Enderby dance at last with the forecast of a violent cold in his system, which

verified itself the next morning. He had been housed a week, when Jeff Durgin came to see him. "Why didn't

you let me know you were sick?" he demanded, "I'd have come and looked after you."

"Thank you," said Westover, with as much stiffness as he could command in his physical limpness. "I

shouldn't have allowed you to look after me; and I want you to understand, now, that there can't be any sort of

friendliness between us till you've accounted for your behavior with Lynde the other night."

"Yes!" cried Westover. "If I had not been shut up ever since, I should have gone to see you and had it out

with you. I've only let you in, now, to give you the chance to explain; and I refuse to hear a word from you

till you do." Westover did not think that this was very forcible, and he was not much surprised that it made

"Why, I don't know what there is to explain. I suppose you think I got him drunk; I know what you thought

that night. But he was pretty well loaded when he struck my champagne. It wasn't a question of what he was

going to do any longer, but how he was going to do it. I kept an eye on him, and at the right time I helped the

caterer's man to get him up into that room where he wouldn't make any trouble. I expected to go back and

"I don't suppose, really, that you're aware what a devil's argument that is," said Westover. "You got Lynde

drunk, and then you went back to his sister, and allowed her to treat you as if you were a gentleman, and

didn't deserve to be thrown out of the house." This at last was something like what Westover had imagined he

"Do you suppose," asked Jeff, with cheerful cynicism, "that it was the first time she was civil to a man her

"No! But all the more you ought to have considered her helplessness. It ought to have made her the more

sacred"Jeff gave an exasperating shrug"to you, and you ought to have kept away from her for decency's

"I can't allow you to be trivial with me, Durgin," said Westover. "You've acted like a blackguard, and worse,

Jeff stood at a corner of the fire, leaning one elbow on the mantel, and he now looked thoughtfully down on

Westover, who had sunk weakly into a chair before the hearth. "I don't deny it from your point of view, Mr.

Westover," he said, without the least resentment in his tone. "You believe that everything is done from a

purpose, or that a thing is intended because it's done. But I see that most things in this world are not thought

about, and not intended. They happen, just as much as the other things that we call accidents."

"Yes," said Westover, "but the wrong things don't happen from people who are in the habit of meaning the

"I believe they do, fully half the time," Jeff returned; "and, as far as the grand result is concerned, you might

as well think them and intend them as not. I don't mean that you ought to do it; that's another thing, and if I

had tried to get Lynde drunk, and then gone to dance with his sister, I should have been what you say I am.

But I saw him getting worse without meaning to make him so; and I went back to her becauseI wanted to."

"And you think, I suppose," said Westover, "that she wouldn't have cared any more than you cared if she had

The painter continued, bitterly: "You used to come in here, the first year, with notions of society women that

would have disgraced a Goth, or a gorilla. Did you form your estimate of Miss Lynde from those premises?"

"I'm not a boy now," Jeff answered, "and I haven't stayed all the kinds of a fool I was."

"Then you don't think Miss Lynde would speak to you, or look at you, after she knew what you had done?"

"I should like to tell her and see," said Jeff, with a hardy laugh. "But I guess I sha'n't have the chance. I've

"Why, yes, I believe I should, if you could tell me what she thoughtnot what she said about it."

"You are a brute," answered Westover, with a puzzled air. What puzzled him most and pleased him least was

the fellow's patience under his severity, which he seemed either not to feel or not to mind. It was of a piece

with the behavior of the rascally boy whom he had cuffed for frightening Cynthia and her little brother long

Jeff said, as if their controversy were at an end and they might now turn to more personal things: "You look

pretty slim, Mr. Westover. A'n't there something I can do for youget you? I've come in with a message from

mother. She says if you ever want to get that winter view of Lion's Head, now's your time. She wants you to

come up there; she and Cynthia both do. They can make you as comfortable as you please, and they'd like to

Westover shook his head ruefully. "It's good of them, and I want you to thank them for me. But I don't know

"Oh, you'll soon get out," said Jeff. "I'm going to look after you a little," and this time Westover was too weak

to protest. He did not forbid Jeff's taking off his overcoat; he suffered him to light his spiritlamp and make a

punch of the whiskey which he owned the doctor was giving him; and when Jeff handed him the steaming

glass, and asked him, "How's that?" he answered, with a pleasure in it which he knew to be deplorable, "It's

Jeff stayed the whole evening with him, and made him more comfortable than he had been since his cold

began. Westover now talked seriously and frankly with him, but no longer so harshly, and in his relenting he

felt a return of his old illogical liking for him. He fancied in Durgin's kindness to himself an indirect regret,

and a desire to atone for what he had done, and he said: "The effect is in youthe worst effect. I don't think

either of the young Lyndes very exemplary people. But you'd be doing yourself a greater wrong than you've

Jeff seemed struck by this notion. "What do you want me to do? What can I do? Chase myself out of society?

Something like that? I'm willing. It's too easy, though. As I said, I've never been wanted much, there, and I

"Well, then, how would you like to leave it to the people at Lion's Head to say what you should do?"

I shouldn't like it," said Jeff, promptly. "They'd judge it as you do as if they'd done it themselves. That's the

reason women are not fit to judge." His gay face darkened. "But tell 'em if you want to."

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Westover. I didn't mean that. I only meant that you're an idealist. I look at this thing

as if some one else had done it; I believe that's the practical way; and I shouldn't go in for punishing any one

else for such a thing very severely." He made another punchfor himself this time, he said; but Westover

"What's the reason?" Jeff demanded; and now either the punch had begun to work in Westover's brain, or

some other influence of like force and quality. He perceived that in this earthbound temperament was the

potentiality of all the success it aimed at. The acceptance of the moral fact as it was, without the unconscious

effort to better it, or to hold himself strictly to account for it, was the secret of the power in the man which

would bring about the material results he desired; and this simplicity of the motive involved had its charm.

Westover was aware of liking Durgin at that moment much more than he ought, and of liking him helplessly.

In the light of his goodnatured selfishness, the injury to the Lyndes showed much less a sacrilege than it had

seemed; Westover began to see it with Jeff's eyes, and to see it with reference to what might be low and mean

He was sensible of the growth Jeff had made intellectually. He had not been at Harvard nearly four years for

nothing. He had phrases and could handle them. In whatever obscure or perverse fashion, he had profited by

his opportunities. The fellow who could accuse him of being an idealist, and could in some sort prove it, was

no longer a naughty boy to be tutored and punished. The revolt latent in him would be violent in proportion

to the pressure put upon him, and Westover began to be without the wish to press his fault home to him so

strongly. In the optimism generated by the punch, he felt that he might leave the case to Jeff himself; or else

in the comfort we all experience in sinking to a lower level, he was unwilling to make the effort to keep his

own moral elevation. But he did make an effort to save himself by saying: " You can't get what you've done

before yourself as you can the action of some one else. It's part of you, and you have to judge the motive as

"Well, that's what I'm doing," said Jeff; "but it seems to me that you're trying to have me judge of the effect

from a motive I didn't have. As far as I can make out, I hadn't any motive at all."

He laughed, and all that Westover could say was, "Then you're still responsible for the result." But this no

It was not a condition of Westover's welcome at Lion's Head that he should seem peculiarly the friend of Jeff

Durgin, but he could not help making it so, and he began to overact the part as soon as he met Jeff's mother.

He had to speak of him in thanking her for remembering his wish to paint Lion's Head in the winter, and he

had to tell her of Jeff's thoughtfulness during the past fortnight; he had to say that he did not believe he

should ever have got away if it had not been for him. This was true; Durgin had even come in from

Cambridge to see him off on the train; he behaved as if the incident with Lynde and all their talk about it had

cemented the friendship between Westover and himself, and he could not be too devoted. It now came out

that he had written home all about Westover, and made his mother put up a stove in the painter's old room, so

It was an airtight woodstove, and it filled the chamber with a heat in which Westover drowsed as soon as

he entered it. He threw himself on the bed, and slept away the fatigue of his railroad journey and the cold of

his drive with Jombateeste from the station. His nap was long, and he woke from it in a pleasant languor,

with the dreamclouds still hanging in his brain. He opened the damper of his stove, and set it roaring again;

then he pulled down the upper sash of his window and looked out on a world whose elements of wood and

snow and stone he tried to co ordinate. There was nothing else in that world but these things, so repellent of

one another. He suffered from the incongruity of the wooden bulk of the hotel, with the white drifts deep

about it, and with the granite cliffs of Lion's Head before it, where the gray crags darkened under the pink

afternoon light which was beginning to play upon its crest from the early sunset. The wind that had seemed to

bore through his thick cap and his skull itself, and that had tossed the dry snow like dust against his eyes on

his way from the railroad, had now fallen, and an incomparable quiet wrapped the solitude of the hills. A

teasing sense of the impossibility of the scene, as far as his art was concerned, filled him full of a fond despair

of rendering its feeling. He could give its light and color and form in a sufficiently vivid suggestion of the

fact, but he could not make that pink flush seem to exhale, like a long breath, upon those rugged shapes; he

could not impart that sentiment of delicately, almost of elegance, which he found in the wilderness, while

every detail of civilization physically distressed him. In one place the snow had been dug down to the pine

planking of the pathway round the house; and the contact of this woodenness with the frozen ground pierced

his nerves and set his teeth on edge like a harsh noise. When once he saw it he had to make an effort to take

his eyes from it, and in a sort unknown to him in summer he perceived the offence of the hotel itself amid the

pure and lonely beauty of the winter landscape. It was a note of intolerable banality, of philistine pretence and

vulgar convention, such as Whitwell's low, unpainted cottage at the foot of the hill did not give, nor the little

red schoolhouse, on the other hand, showing through the naked trees. There should have been really no

human habitation visible except a wigwam in the shelter of the pines, here and there; and when he saw

Whitwell making his way up the hillside road, Westover felt that if there must be any human presence it

should be some savage clad in skins, instead of the philosopher in his rubber boots and his clothingstore

ulster. He preferred the small, wiry shape of Jombateeste, in his blue woollen cap and his Canadian footgear,

as he ran round the corner of the house toward the barn, and left the breath of his pipe in the fine air behind

The light began to deepen from the pale pink to a crimson which stained the tops and steeps of snow, and

deepened the dark of the woods massed on the mountain slopes between the irregular fields of white. The

burnished brown of the hardwood trees, the dull carbon shadows of the evergreens, seemed to wither to one

black as the red strengthened in the sky. Westover realized that he had lost the best of any possible picture in

letting that first delicate color escape him. This crimson was harsh and vulgar in comparison; it would have

almost a chromo quality; he censured his pleasure in it as something gross and material, like that of eating;

and on a sudden he felt hungry. He wondered what time they would give him supper, and he took slight

account of the fact that a caprice of the wind had torn its hood of snow from the mountain summit, and that

the profile of the Lion's Head showed almost as distinctly as in summer. He stood before the picture which

for that day at least was lost to him, and questioned whether there would be a hearty meal, something like a

dinner, or whether there would be something like a farmhouse supper, mainly of doughnuts and tea.

He pulled up his window and was going to lie down again, when some one knocked, and Frank Whitwell

stood at the door. "Do you want we should bring your supper to you here, Mr. Westover, or will you"

"Oh, let me join you all!" cried the painter, eagerly. "Is it ready shall I come now?"

"Well, in about five minutes or so." Frank went away, after setting down in the room the lamp he had

brought. It was a lamp which Westover thought he remembered from the farmhouse period, and on his way

down he realized as he had somehow not done in his summer sojourns, the entirety of the old house in the

hotel which had encompassed it. The primitive cold of its stairways and passages struck upon him as soon as

he left his own room, and he found the parlor door closed against the chill. There was a hot stovefire within,

and a kerosenelamp turned low, but there was no one there, and he had the photograph of his first picture of

Lion's Head to himself in the dim light. The voices of Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia came to him from the

diningroom, and from the kitchen beyond, with the occasional clash of crockery, and the clang of iron upon

iron about the stove, and the quick tread of women's feet upon the bare floor. With these pleasant noises came

the smell of cooking, and later there was an opening and shutting of doors, with a thrill of the freezing air

from without, and the dull thumping of Whitwell's rubber boots, and the quicker flapping of Jombateeste's

soft leathern soles. Then there was the sweep of skirted feet at the parlor door, and Cynthia Whitwell came in

without perceiving him. She went to the table by the darkening window, and quickly turned up the light of

the lamp. In her ignorance of his presence, he saw her as if she had been alone, almost as if she were out of

the body; he received from her unconsciousness the impression of something rarely pure and fine, and he had

a sudden compassion for her, as for something precious that is fated to be wasted or misprized. At a little

movement which he made to relieve himself from a sense of eavesdropping, she gave a start, and shut her lips

"I didn't know you were here," she said; and she flushed with the shyness of him which she always showed at

first. She had met him already with the rest, but they had scarcely spoken together; and he knew of the

struggle she must now be making with herself when she went on: "I didn't know you had been called. I

"Yes. I seemed to sleep for centuries," said West over, "and I woke up feeling coeval with Lion's Head. But I

She faltered, and then she asked: "Did you see the light on it when the sun went down?"

"Wasn't that what you came for?" she asked, by one of the efforts she was making with everything she said.

He could have believed he saw the pulse throbbing in her neck. But she held herself stonestill, and he

"Yes, I came for that," said Westover. "That's what makes it so dismaying. If I had only happened on it, I

She smiled, as if she liked his lightness, but doubted if she ought. "We don't often get Lion's Head clear of

"Yes; that's another hardship," said the painter. "Everything is against me! If we don't have a snow overnight,

She played with the little wheel of the wick; she looked down, and then, with a glance flashed at him, she

Apparently she could not say anything to that. He tried to get the lamp to carry it out for her, but she would

It was all nothing, but it was all very charming, and Westover was richly content with it; and yet not content,

for he felt that the pleasure of it was not truly his, but was a moment of merely borrowed happiness.

The table was laid in the old farmhouse sittingroom where he had been served alone when he first came to

Lion's Head. But now he sat down with the whole family, even to Jombateeste, who brought in a faint odor of

They had each been in contact with the finer world which revisits nature in the summertime, and they must

all have known something of its usages, but they had reverted in form and substance to the rustic living of

their neighbors. They had steak for Westover, and baked potatoes; but for themselves they had such farm fare

as Mrs. Durgin had given him the first time he supped there. They made their meal chiefly of doughnuts and

tea, and hot biscuit, with some sweet dishes of a festive sort added in recognition of his presence; and there

was mincepie for all. Mrs. Durgin and Whitwell ate with their knives, and Jombateeste filled himself so

soon with every implement at hand that he was able to ask excuse of the others if he left them for the horses

before they had half finished. Frank Whitwell fed with a kind of official or functional conformity to the ways

of summer folks; but Cynthia, at whom Westover glanced with anxiety, only drank some tea and ate a little

bread and butter. He was ashamed of his anxiety, for he had owned that it ought not to have mattered if she

had used her knife like her father; and it seemed to him as if he had prompted Mrs. Durgin by his curious

glance to say: "We don't know half the time how the child lives. Cynthy! Take something to eat!"

Cynthia pleaded that she was not hungry; Mrs. Durgin declared that she would die if she kept on as she was

going; and then the girl escaped to the kitchen on one of the errands which she made from time to time

"I presume it's your coming, Mr. Westover," Mrs. Durgin went on, with the comfortable superiority of elderly

people to all the trials of the young. "I don't know why she should make a stranger of you, every time. You've

"Ever since you give Jeff what he deserved for scaring her and Frank with his dog," said Whitwell.

"Poor Fox!" Mrs. Durgin sighed. "He did have the least sense for a dog I ever saw. And Jeff used to be so

"He's gone to the happy huntinggrounds now. Colorady didn't agree with himor old age," said Whitwell. "I

don't see why the Injuns wa'n't right," he pursued, thoughtfully. "If they've got souls, why ha'n't their dogs? I

suppose Mr. Westover here would say there wa'n't any certainty about the Injuns themselves!"

"You know my weak point, Mr. Whitwell," the painter confessed. "But I can't prove they haven't."

"Nor dogs, neither, I guess," said Whitwell, tolerantly. "It's curious, though, if animals have got souls, that we

ha'n't ever had any communications from 'em. You might say that ag'in' the idea."

"No, I'll let you say it," returned Westover. "But a good many of the communications seem to come from the

Whitwell laughed out his delight in the thrust. "Well, I guess that's something so. And them old Egyptian

devils, over there, that you say discovered the doctrine of immortality, seemed to think a cat was about as

good as a man. What's that," he appealed to Mrs. Durgin, "Jackson said in his last letter about their cat

"Well, I guess I'll finish my supper first," said Mrs. Durgin, whose nerves Westover would not otherwise

have suspected of faintness. "But Jackson's letters," she continued, loyally, "are about the best letters!"

"Know they'd got some of 'em in the papers?" Whitwell asked; and at the surprise that Westover showed he

told him how a fellow who was trying to make a paper go over at the Huddle, had heard of Jackson's letters

and teased for some of them, and had printed them as neighborhood news in that side of his paper which he

Mrs. Durgin studied with modest deprecation the effect of the fact upon Westover, and seemed satisfied with

it. "Well, of course, it's interestin' to Jackson's old friends in the country, here. They know he'd look at things,

over there, pretty much as they would. Well, I had to lend the letters round so much, anyway, it was a kind of

a relief to have 'em in the paper, where everybody could see 'em, and be done with it. Mr. Whit'ell here, he

fixes 'em up so's to leave out the family part, and I guess they're pretty well thought of."

Westover said he had no doubt they were, and he should want to see all the letters they could show him, in

"If Jackson only had Jeff's health and opportunities" the mother began, with a suppressed passion in her

Frank Whitwell pushed back his chair. "I guess I'll ask to be excused," he said to the head of table.

"There! I a'n't goin' to say any more about that, if that's what you're afraid of, Frank," said Mrs. Durgin.

"Well, I presume I do talk a good deal about Jackson when I get goin', and I presume it's natural Cynthy

shouldn't want I should talk about Jeff before folks. Frank, a'n't you goin' to wait for that plate of hot

"I guess I don't care for anything more," said Frank, and he got himself out of the room more inarticulately

His, father followed his retreat with an eye of humorous intelligence. "I guess Frank don't want to keep the

young ladies waitin' a great while. There's a church sociable over 't the Huddle," he explained to Westover.

"Well, the young folks don't any of 'em seem to want to talk about such things nowadays, and I don't know as

The biscuit that Cynthia brought in were burned a little on top, and Mrs. Durgin recognized the fact with the

question, "Did you get to studyin', out there? Take one, do, Mr. Westover! You ha'n't made half a meal! If I

didn't keep round after her, I don't know what would become of us all. The young ladies down at Boston, any

"I suppose they do in the Harvard Annex," said Westover, simply, in spite of the glance with which Mrs.

Durgin tried to convey a covert meaning. He understood it afterward, but for the present his

She remained to clear away the table, when the rest left it, and Westover followed Mrs. Durgin into the

parlor, where she indemnified herself for refraining from any explicit allusion to Jeff before Cynthia. "The

boy," she explained, when she had made him ransack his memory for every scrap of fact concerning her son,

"don't hardly ever write to me, and I guess he don't give Cynthy very much news. I presume he's workin'

harder than ever this year. And I'm glad he's goin' about a little, from what you say. I guess he's got to feelin'

a little better. It did worry me for him to feel so what you may call meechin' about folks. You see anything

After Westover got back into his own room, some one knocked at his door, and he found Whitwell outside.

He scarcely asked him to come in, but Whitwell scarcely needed the invitation. "Got everything you want? I

told Cynthy I'd come up and see after you; Frank won't be back in time." He sat down and put his feet on top

of the stove, and struck the heels of his boots on its edge, from the habit of knocking the caked snow off them

in that way on stovetops. He did not wait to find out that there was no responsive sizzling before he asked,

"Why, in the old way." Whitwell kept his eye on him, and he added: "I suppose we don't any of us change;

Whitwell smiled with pleasure in the loosely philosophic suggestion. "You mean that he's the same kind of a

man that he was a boy? Well, I guess that's so. The question is, what kind of a boy was he? I've been mullin'

over that consid'able since Cynthy and him fixed it up together. Of course, I know it's their business, and all

He referred the point to Westover, who knew an inner earnestness in it, in spite of Whitwell's habit of outside

jocosity. "Every right in the world, I should say, Mr. Whitwell," he answered, seriously.

"Well, I'm glad you feel that way," said Whitwell, with a little apparent surprise. "I don't want to meddle,

any; but I know what Cynthy isI no need to brag her upand I don't feel so over and above certain 't I

know what he is. He's a good deal of a mixture, if you want to know how he strikes me. I don't mean I don't

like him; I do; the fellow's got a way with him that makes me kind of like him when I see him. He's good

natured and clever; and he's willin' to take any amount of trouble for you; but you can't tell where to have

him." Westover denied the appeal for explicit assent in Whitwell's eye, and he went on: "If I'd done that

fellow a good turn, in spite of him, or if I'd held him up to something that he allowed was right, and

consented to, I should want to keep a sharp lookout that he didn't play me some ugly trick for it. He's a

comical devil," Whitwell ended, rather inadequately. "How d's it look to you? Seen anything lately that

"No, no; I can't say that I have," said Westover, reluctantly. He wished to be franker than he now meant to be,

but he consulted a scruple that he did not wholly respect; a mere convention it seemed to him, presently. He

said: "I've always felt that charm in him, too, and I've seen the other traits, though not so clearly as you seem

"Really, Mr. Whitwell, I don't know that you have any right to expect me to talk him over, when I'm here as

"No. I ha'n't," said Whitwell. "What about the father of the girl he's goin' to marry?"

Westover could not deny the force of this. "You'd be anxious if I didn't tell you what I had in mind, I dare

say, more than if I did." He told him of Jeff's behavior with Alan Lynde, and of his talk with him about it.

Whitwell did not assent directly, somewhat to Westover's surprise. He asked: "Fellow ever done anything to

Whitwell kicked his heels on the edge of the stove again. "Then it might been an accident," he said, dryly.

Westover had to break the silence that followed, and he found himself defending Jeff, though somehow not

for Jeff's sake. He urged that if he had the strong will they both recognized in him, he would never commit

"How do you know that a strongwilled man a'n't a weak one?" Whitwell astonished him by asking. "A'n't

what we call a strong will just a kind of a bulldog clinch that the dog himself can't unloose? I take it a man

that has a good will is a strong man. If Jeff done a right thing against his will, he wouldn't rest easy till he'd

showed that he wa'n't obliged to, by some mischief worse 'n what he was kept out of. I tell you, Mr.

Westover, if I'd made that fellow toe the mark any way, I'd be afraid of him." Whitwell looked at Westover

with eyes of significance, if not of confidence. Then he rose with a prolonged "Mwelll! We're all born,

but we a'n't all buried. This world is a queer place. But I guess Jeff 'll come out right in the end."

Westover said, "I'm sure he will!" and he shook hands warmly with the father of the girl Jeff was going to

Whitwell came back, after he had got some paces away, and said: "Of course, this is between you and me,

"I don't mean Mis' Durgin. I shouldn't care what she thought of my talkin' him over with you. I don't know,"

he continued, putting up his hand against the doorframe, to give himself the comfort of its support while he

talked, "as you understood what she mean by the young ladies at Boston keepin' up with the fellows in

college. Well, that's what Cynthy's doin' with Jeff, right along; and if he ever works off them conditions of

his, and gits his degree, it' ll be because she helped him to. I tell you, there's more than one kind of telepathy

Westover understood from Whitwell's afterthought that it was Cynthia he was anxious to keep ignorant of his

misgivings, if they were so much as misgivings. But the importance of this fact could not stay him against the

tide of sleep which was bearing him down. When his head touched the pillow it swept over him, and he rose

from it in the morning with a gayety of heart which he knew to be returning health. He jumped out of bed,

and stuffed some shavings into his stove from the woodbox beside it, and laid some logs on them; he slid

the damper open, and then lay down again, listening to the fire that showed its red teeth through the slats and

roared and laughed to the day which sparkled on the white world without. When he got out of bed a second

time, he found the room so hot that he had to pull down his windowsash, and he dressed in a temperature of

twenty degrees below zero without knowing that the dry air was more than fresh. Mrs. Durgin called to him

through the open door of her parlor, as he entered the diningroom: " Cynthy will give you your breakfast,

Mr. Westover. We're all done long ago, and I'm busy in here," and the girl appeared with the coffeepot and

the dishes she had been keeping hot for him at the kitchen stove. She seemed to be going to leave him when

she had put them down before him, but she faltered, and then she asked: "Do you want I should pour your

"Oh yes! Do!" he begged, and she sat down across the table from him. "I'm ashamed to make this trouble for

He laughed, and said: "How strange that seems! I suppose I shall get used to it. But in town we seem never to

have a whole day for a day's work; we always have to do part of it at night, or the next morning. Do you ever

"You can nearly always find something to do about a house," she returned, evasively. "But the time doesn't

"Oh, I know how the country is in the winter," he said. "I was brought up in the country."

"I didn't know that," she said, and she gave him a stare of surprise before her eyes fell.

"Yes. Out in Wisconsin. My people were emigrants, and I lived in the woods, there, till I began to paint my

"Summer folks, like the rest? No, I'm alltheyearround folks originally. But I haven't been in the country

in the winter since I was a boy; and it's all been coming back to me, here, like some one else's experience."

She did not say anything, but the interest in her eyes, which she could not keep from his face now, prompted

"You can make a beginning in the West easier than you can in the East, and some people who came to our

lumber camp discovered me, and gave me a chance to begin. I went to Milwaukee first, and they made me

think I was somebody. Then I came on to New York, and they made me think I was nobody. I had to go to

Europe to find out which I was; but after I had been there long enough I didn't care to know. What I was

trying to do was the important thing to me; not the fellow who was trying to do it."

"I met some Boston people in Italy, and I thought I should like to live where that kind of people lived. That's

the way I came to be in Boston. It all seems very simple now, but I used to think it might look romantic from

the outside. I've had a happy life; and I'm glad it began in the country. I shouldn't care if it ended there. I don't

know why I've bothered you with my autobiography, though. Perhaps because I thought you knew it

She looked as if she would have said something fitting if she could have ruled herself to it; but she said

nothing at all. Her failure seemed to abash her, and she could only ask him if he would not have some more

That day he tried for his picture from several points outofdoors before he found that his own window gave

him the best. With the window open, and the stove warm at his back, he worked there in great comfort nearly

every afternoon. The snows kept off, and the clear sunsets burned behind the summit day after day. He

painted frankly and faithfully, and made a picture which, he said to himself, no one would believe in, with

that warm color tender upon the frozen hills. The soft suffusion of the winter scene was improbable to him

when he had it in, nature before his eyes; when he looked at it as he got it on his canvas it was simply

In the forenoons he had nothing to do, for he worked at his picture only when the conditions renewed

themselves with the sinking sun. He tried to be in the open air, and get the good of it; but his strength for

walking had failed him, and he kept mostly to the paths broken around the house. He went a good deal to the

barn with Whitwell and Jombateeste to look after the cattle and the horses, whose subdued stamping and

champing gave him a sort of animal pleasure. The blended odors of the haymows and of the creatures'

breaths came to him with the faint warmth which their bodies diffused through the cold obscurity.

When the wide doors were rolled back, and the full day was let in, he liked the appeal of their startled eyes,

and the calls they made to one another from their stalls, while the men spoke back to them in terms which

they seemed to have in common with them, and with the poultry that flew down from the barn lofts to the

In these simple experiences he could not imagine the summer life of the place. It was nowhere more extinct

than in the hollow verandas, where the rockingchairs swung in July and August, and where Westover's steps

in his long tramps up and down woke no echo of the absent feet. Indoors he kept to the few stoveheated

rooms where he dwelt with the family, and sent only now and then a vague conjecture into the hotel built

round the old farmhouse. He meant, before he left, to ask Mrs. Durgin to let him go through the hotel, but he

put it off from day to day, with a physical shrinking from its cold and solitude.

The days went by in the swiftness of monotony. His excursions to the barn, his walks on the verandas, his

work on his picture, filled up the few hours of the light, and when the dark came he contentedly joined the

little group in Mrs. Durgin's parlor. He had brought two or three books with him, and sometimes he read from

one of them; or he talked with Whitwell on some of the questions of life and death that engaged his

speculative mind. Jombateeste preferred the kitchen for the naps he took after supper before his early

bedtime. Frank Whitwell sat with his books there, where Westover sometimes saw his sister helping him at

his studies. He was loyally faithful and obedient to her in all things. He helped her with the dishes, and was

not ashamed to be seen at this work; she had charge of his goings and comings in society; he submitted to her

taste in his dress, and accepted her counsel on many points which he referred to her, and discussed with her in

lowspoken conferences. He seemed a formal, serious boy, shy like his sister; his father let fall some hints of

a religious cast of mind in him. He had an ambition beyond the hotel; he wished to study for the ministry; and

it was not alone the chance of going home with the girls that made him constant at the evening meetings. "I

don't know where he gits it," said his father, with a shake of the head that suggested doubt of the wisdom of

Cynthia had the same care of her father as of her brother; she kept him neat, and held him up from lapsing

into the slovenliness to which he would have tended if she had not, as Westover suspected, made constant

appeals to him for the respect due their guest. Mrs. Durgin, for her part, left everything to Cynthia, with a

contented acceptance of her future rule and an abiding trust in her sense and strength, which included the

details of the light work that employed her rather luxurious leisure. Jombateeste himself came to Cynthia

with his mending, and her needle kept him tight and firm against the winter which it amused Westover to

realize was the Canuck's native element, insomuch that there was now something incongruous in the notion

The girl's motherly care of all the household did not leave Westover out. Buttons appeared on garments long

used to shifty contrivances for getting on without them; buttonholes were restored to their proper limits; his

overcoat pockets were searched for gloves, and the gloves put back with their fingertips drawn close as the

He wondered how he could thank her for his share of the blessing that her passion for motherly care was to

all the house. It was pathetic, and he used sometimes to forecast her selfdevotion with a tender indignation,

which included a due sense of his own present demerit. He was not reconciled to the sacrifice because it

seemed the happiness, or at least the will, of the nature which made it. All the same it seemed a waste, in its

Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia sat by the lamp and sewed at night, or listened to the talk of the men. If Westover

read aloud, they whispered together from time to time about some matters remote from it, as women always

do where there is reading. It was quiet, but it was not dull for Westover, who found himself in no hurry to get

Sometimes he thought of the town with repulsion; its unrest, its vacuous, troubled life haunted him like a

memory of sickness; but he supposed that when he should be quite well again all that would change, and be

as it was before. He interested himself, with the sort of shrewd ignorance of it that Cynthia showed in the

questions she asked about it now and then when they chanced to be left alone together. He fancied that she

was trying to form some intelligible image of Jeff's environment there, and was piecing together from his talk

of it the impressions she had got from summer folks. He did his best to help her, and to construct for her a

A time came when he spoke frankly of Jeff in something they were saying, and she showed no such shrinking

as he had expected she would; he reflected that she might have made stricter conditions with Mrs. Durgin

than she expected to keep herself in mentioning him. This might well have been necessary with the mother's

pride in her son, which knew no stop when it once began to indulge itself. What struck Westover more than

the girl's selfpossession when they talked of Jeff was a certain austerity in her with regard to him. She

seemed to hold herself tense against any praise of him, as if she should fail him somehow if she relaxed at all

This, at least, was the rather mystifying impression which Westover got from her evident wish to criticise and

understand exactly all that he reported, rather than to flatter herself from it. Whatever her motive was, he was

aware that through it all she permitted herself a closer and fuller trust of himself. At times it was almost too

implicit; he would have liked to deserve it better by laying open all that had been in his heart against Jeff. But

he forbore, of course, and he took refuge, as well as he could, in the respect by which she held herself at a

One morning Westover got leave from Mrs. Durgin to help Cynthia open the dim rooms and cold corridors at

the hotel to the sun and air. She promised him he should take his death, but he said he would wrap up warm,

and when he came to join the girl in his overcoat and fur cap, he found Cynthia equipped with a woollen

"Is that all?" he reproached her. "I ought to have put on a single wreath of artificial flowers and some sort of a

"I believe women can stand about twice as much cold as you can, the best of you," she answered, grimly.

"Then I must try to keep myself as warm as I can with work," he said. "You must let me do all the rough

"There isn't any rough work about it," she answered, in a sort of motherly toleration of his mood, without

She took care of him, he perceived, as she took care of her brother and her father, but with a delicate respect

They began with the office and the parlor, where they flung up the windows, and opened the doors, and then

they opened the diningroom, where the tables stood in long rows, with the chairs piled on them legs upward.

Cynthia went about with many sighs for the dust on everything, though to Westover's eyes it all seemed

frigidly clean. "If it goes on as it has for the past two years," she said, "we shall have to add on a new

"I never wanted it to go beyond the original farmhouse," said Westover. "I've been jealous of every boarder

but the first. I should have liked to keep it for myself, and let the world know Lion's Head from my pictures."

"I guess Mrs. Durgin thinks it was your picture that began to send people here."

"And do you blame me, too? What if the thing I'm doing now should make it a winter resort? Nothing could

save you, then, but a fire. I believe that's Jeff's ambition. Only he would want to put another hotel in place of

this; something that would be more popular. Then the ruin I began would be complete, and I shouldn't come

"I guess Mrs. Durgin wouldn't think it was lion's Head if you stopped coming," said Cynthia.

"But you would know better than that," said Westover; and then he was sorry he had said it, for it seemed to

ask something of different quality from her honest wish to make him know their regard for him.

She did not answer, but went down a long corridor to which they had mounted, to raise the window at the

end, while he raised another at the opposite extremity. When they met at the stairway again to climb to the

story above, he said: "I am always ashamed when I try to make a person of sense say anything silly," and she

flushed, still without answering, as if she understood him, and his meaning pleased her. "But fortunately a

person of sense is usually equal to the temptation. One ought to be serious when he tries it with a person of

"Do you feel any draught between these windows?" asked Cynthia, abruptly. "I don't want you should take

She went into the rooms on one side of the corridor, and put up their windows, and flung the blinds back. He

did the same on the other side. He got a peculiar effect of desolation from the mattresses pulled down over

the foot of the bedsteads, and the dismantled interiors reflected in the mirrors of the dressingcases; and he

was going to speak of it when he rejoined Cynthia at the stairway leading to the third story, when she said,

"Those were Mrs. Vostrand's rooms I came out of the last." She nodded her head over her shoulder toward

"Yes; I always think of rooms by the name of people that have them, if they're any way peculiar."

He thought this bit of uncandor charming, and accepted it as if it were the whole truth. "And Mrs. Vostrand

"But you wouldn't have come to think of her rooms by her name if she hadn't made a strong impression on

The girl would not speak, and Mr. Westover went on: "She used to be very good to me, and I think she used

to be better to herself than she is now." He knew that Jeff must have told Cynthia of his affair with Genevieve

Vostrand, and he kept himself from speaking of her by a resolution he thought creditable, as he mounted the

stairs to the upper story in the silence to which Cynthia left his last remark. At the top she made a little pause

in the obscurer light of the closeshuttered corridor, while she said: "I liked her daughter the best."

"Yes?" he returned. "Inever felt very well acquainted with her, I believe. One couldn't get far with her.

Though, for the matter of that, one didn't get far with Mrs. Vostrand herself. Did you think Genevieve was

"No, that was it. She was what her mother wished her to be. I've often wondered how much she was

Cynthia let a rustic silence ensue, and Westover shrank again from the inquisition he longed to make.

It was not Genevieve Vostrand's marriage which really concerned him, but Cynthia's engagement, and it was

her mind that he would have liked to look into. It might well be supposed that she regarded it in a perfect

matteroffact way, and with no ambition beyond it. She was a country girl, acquainted from childhood with

facts of life which townbred girls would not have known without a blunting of the sensibilities, and why

should she be different from other country girls? She might be as good and as fine as he saw her, and yet be

insensible to the spiritual toughness of Jeff, because of her love for him. Her very goodness might make his

badness unimaginable to her, and if her refinement were from the conscience merely, and not from the tastes

and experiences, too, there was not so much to dread for her in her marriage with such a man. Still, he would

have liked, if he could, to tell her what he had told her father of Durgin's behavior with Lynde, and let her

bring the test of her self devotion to the case with a clear understanding. He had sometimes been afraid that

Whitwell might not be able to keep it to himself; but now he wished that the philosopher had not been so

discreet. He had all this so absorbingly in mind that he started presently with the fear that she had said

something and he had not answered, but when he asked her he found that she had not spoken. They were

standing at an open window looking out upon Lion's Head, when he said: "I don't know how I shall show my

gratitude to Mrs. Durgin and you for thinking of having me up here. I've done a picture of Lion's Head that

might be ever so much worse; but I shouldn't have dreamed of getting at it if it hadn't been for you, though

I've so often dreamed of doing it. Now I shall go home richer in every sort of waythanks to you."

She answered, simply: "You needn't thank anybody; but it was Jeff who thought of it; we were ready enough

"That was very good of him," said Westover, whom her words confirmed in a suspicion he had had all along.

But what did it matter that Jeff had suggested their asking him, and then attributed the notion to them? It was

not so malign for him to use that means of ingratiating himself with Westover, and of making him forget his

behavior with Lynde, and it was not unnatural. It was very characteristic; at the worst it merely proved that

Jeff was more ashamed of what he had done than he would allow, and that was to his credit.

He heard Cynthia asking: "Mr. Westover, have you ever been at Class Day? He wants us to come."

"Class Day? Oh, Class Day!" He took a little time to gather himself together. "Yes, I've been at a good many.

If you care to see something pretty, it's the prettiest thing in the world. The students' sisters and mothers come

from everywhere; and there's fashion and feasting and flirting, from ten in the morning till ten at night. I'm

not sure there's so much happiness; but I can't tell. The young people know about that. I fancy there's a good

deal of defeat and disappointment in it all. But if you like beautiful dresses, and music and dancing, and a

great flutter of gayety, you can get more of it at Class Day than you can in any other way. The good time

depends a great deal upon the acquaintance a student has, and whether he is popular in college." Westover

Cynthia did not apparently notice his hesitation. "Do you think Mrs. Durgin would like it?"

"Mrs. Durgin?" Westover found that he had been leaving her out of the account, and had been thinking only

of Cynthia's pleasure or pain. "Well, I don't supposeit would be rather fatiguingDid Jeff want her to

"That's very nice of him. If he could devote himself to her; butAnd would she like to go?"

"To please him, she would." Westover was silent, and the girl surprised him by the appeal she suddenly made

to him. "Mr. Westover, do you believe it would be very well for either of us to go? I think it would be better

for us to leave all that part of his life alone. It's no use in pretending that we're like the kind of people he

Westover felt his heart rise in indignant sympathy. "There isn't any one he knows to compare with you!" he

said, and in this he was thinking mainly of Bessie Lynde. "You're worth a thousand If I wereif he's half

Cynthia put her head far out of the window and looked along the steep roof before them. "There is a blind off

one of the windows. I heard it clapping in the wind the other night. I must go and see the number of the

room." She drew her head in quickly and ran away without letting him see her face.

"No, no!" she called back. "Frank will do that, or Jombateeste, when they come to shut up the house."

Westover, did not meet Durgin for several days after his return from Lion's Head. He brought messages for

him from his mother and from Whitwell, and he waited for him to come and get them so long that he had to

blame himself for not sending them to him. When Jeff appeared, at the end of a week, Westover had a certain

embarrassment in meeting him, and the effort to overcome this carried him beyond his sincerity. He was

aware of feigning the cordiality he showed, and of having less real liking for him than ever before. He

suggested that he must be busier every day, now, with his college work, and he resented the air of social

prosperity which Jeff put on in saying, Yes, there was that, and then he had some engagements which kept

He did not say what the engagements were, and they did not recur to the things they had last spoken of.

Westover could not do so without Jeff's leading, and he was rather glad that he gave none. He stayed only a

little time, which was spent mostly in a show of interest on both sides, and the hollow hilarities which people

use to mask their indifference to one another's being and doing. Jeff declared that he had never seen Westover

looking so well, and said he must go up to Lion's Head again; it had done him good. As for his picture, it was

a corker; it made him feel as if he were there! He asked about all the folks, and received Westover's replies

with vague laughter, and an absence in his bold eye, which made the painter wonder what his mind was on,

without the wish to find out. He was glad to have him go, though he pressed him to drop in soon again, and

Jeff said he would like to do that, and he asked at the door whether Westover was going to the tea at Mrs.

Bellingham's. He said he had to look in there, before he went out to Cambridge; and left Westover in mute

amaze at the length he had apparently gone in a road that had once seemed no thoroughfare for him. Jeff's

social acceptance, even after the Enderby ball, which was now some six or seven weeks past, had been slow;

but of late, for no reason that he or any one else could have given, it had gained a sudden precipitance; and

people who wondered why they met him at other houses began to ask him to their own.

He did not care to go to their houses, and he went at first in the hope of seeing Bessie Lynde again. But this

did not happen for some time, and it was a midLenten tea that brought them together. As soon as he caught

sight of her he went up to her and began to talk as if they had been in the habit of meeting constantly. She

"I think I can trust you," she answered, but she sank a little into the shelter of the curtains, not to be seen

talking with him, perhaps, or not to be interruptedshe did not analyze her motive closely.

He remained talking to her until she went away, and then he contrived to go with her. She did not try to

escape him after that; each time they met she had the pleasure of realizing that there had never been any

danger of what never happened. But beyond this she could perhaps have given no better reason for her

willingness to meet him again and again than the bewildered witnesses of the fact. In her set people not only

never married outside of it, but they never flirted outside of it. For one of themselves, even for a girl like

Bessie, whom they had not quite known from childhood, to be apparently amusing herself with a man like

that, so wholly alien in origin, in tradition, was something unheard of; and it began to look as if Bessie Lynde

was more than amused. It seemed to Mary Enderby that wherever she went she saw that man talking to

Bessie. She could have believed that it was by some evil art that he always contrived to reach Bessie's side, if

anything could have been less like any kind of art than the bold push he made for her as soon as he saw her in

a room. But sometimes Miss Enderby feared that it was Bessie who used such finesse as there was, and

always put herself where he could see her. She waited with trembling for her to give the affair sanction by

making her aunt ask him to something at her house. On the other hand, she could not help feeling that

Bessie's flirtation was all the more deplorable for the want of some such legitimation.

She did not even know certainly whether Jeff ever called upon Bessie at her aunt's house, till one day the man

"Oh, come up, Molly!" Bessie sang out from the floor above, and met her halfway down the stairs, where

Mary Enderby turned her face, the mirror of conscience, upon her, and asked: "Is he your jay?"

Still Mary Enderby found herself with nothing of all she had a thousand times thought she should say to

Bessie if she had ever the slightest chance. It always seemed so easy, till now, to take Bessie in her arms, and

appeal to her good sense, her selfrespect, her regard for her family and friends; and now it seemed so

She heard herself answering, very stiffly: "Perhaps I'd better apologize for what I've said already. You must

"Not at all!" cried Bessie, with a laugh that sounded very mocking and very unworthy to her friend. "He's all

And he doesn't flatter me, or pretend to think much of me. If he did, I couldn't bear him. You know how I am,

Molly. He keeps me interested, don't you understand, and prowling about in the great unknown where be has

Bessie put her hand to her mouth, and laughed at Mary Enderby with her slanted eyes; a sort of Parisian

"I won't tell you more than I knowthough I'd like to," said Bessie. She gave Mary a sudden hug. "You

"I know you're teasing, now," said Mary Enderby, getting up, "and you're quite right. I have no business

Bessie pulled her down upon the seat again. "Yes, you have! Don't I tell you, over and over? He doesn't

respect me, because I don't know how to make him, and he wouldn't like it if I did. But now I'll try to make

you understand. I don't believe I care for him the least; but mind, I'm not certain, for I've never cared for any

one, and I don't know what it's like. You know I'm not sentimental; I think sentiment's funny; and I'm not

"Yes, but you see how my divinity could be improved," said Bessie, with a wild laugh. "I'm not sentimental,

but I'm emotional, and he gives me emotions. He's a riddle, and I'm all the time guessing at him. You get the

answer to the kind of men we know easily; and it's very nice, but it doesn't amuse you so much as trying.

Now, Mr. Durginwhat a name! I can see it makes you creepis no more like one of us than abear is

and his attitude toward us is that of a bear who's gone so much with human beings that he thinks he's a

human being. He's delightful, that way. And, do you know, he's intellectual! He actually brings me books,

and wants to read passages to me out of them! He has brought me the plans of the new hotel he's going to

build. It's to be very aesthetic, and it's going to be called The Lion's Head Inn. There's to be a little theatre, for

amateur dramatics, which I could conduct, and for all sorts of professional amusements. If you should ever

Mary Enderby would not let Bessie laugh upon her shoulder after she said this. "Bessie Lynde," she said,

severely, "if you have no regard for yourself, you ought to have some regard for him. You may say you are

"Oh, I shouldn't say it if I didn't believe it," Bessie broke in, with a mock air of seriousness.

"I must be going," said Mary, stiffly, and this time she succeeded in getting to her feet.

Bessie laid hold of her again. "You think you've been trifled with, don't you, dear?"

"Yes, you do! Don't you try to be slippery, Molly. The plain pikestaff is your style, morally speakingif any

"Yes, I do," said Bessie. "The trouble is, I don't know how I feel. But if I ever do, Molly, I'll tell you! Is that

"I'll give you ample warning. At the least little consciousness in the region of the pericardium, off will go a

note by a district messenger, and when you come I'll do whatever you say. There!"

"Oh, Bessie!" cried her friend, and she threw her arms round her, "you always were the most fascinating

Toward the end of April most people who had places at the Shore were mostly in them, but they came up to

town on frequent errands, and had one effect of evanescence with people who still remained in their Boston

houses provisionally, and seemed more than half absent. The Enderbys had been at the Shore for a fortnight,

and the Lyndes were going to be a fortnight longer in Boston, yet, as Bessie made her friend observe, when

Mary, ran in for lunch, or stopped for a moment on her way to the train, every few days, they were both of the

"It might as well be I as you," Bessie said one day, "if we only think so. It's all very weird, dear, and I'm not

sure but it is you who sit day after day at my lonely casement and watch the sparrows examining the fuzzy

buds of the Jap ivy to see just how soon they can hope to build in the vines. Do you object to the ivy buds

looking so very much like snipped woollen rags? If you do, I'm sure it's you, here in my place, for when I

come up to town in your personality it sets my teeth on edge. In fact, that's the worst thing about Boston

nowthe fuzzy ivy buds; there's so much ivy! When you can forget the buds, there are a great many things

to make you happy. I feel quite as if we were spending the summer in town and I feel very adventurous and

very virtuous, like some sort of selfrighteous bohemian. You don't know how I look down on people who

have gone out of town. I consider them very selfish and heartless; I don't know why, exactly. But when we

have a good marrowfreezing northeasterly storm, and the newspapers come out with their ironical

congratulations to the taxdodgers at the Shore, I feel that Providence is on my side, and I'm getting my

reward, even in this world." Bessie suddenly laughed. "I see by your expression of fixed inattention, Molly,

Mary gave a start of protest, but she was too honest to deny the fact outright, and Bessie ran on:

"No, we don't sit on a bench in the Common, or even in the Garden, or on the walk in Commonwealth

Avenue. If we come to it later, as the season advances, I shall make him stay quite at the other end of the

bench, and not put his hand along the top. You needn't be afraid, Molly; all the proprieties shall be religiously

observed. Perhaps I shall ask Aunt Louisa to let us sit out on her front steps, when the evenings get warmer;

but I assure you it's much more comfortable indoors yet, even in town, though you'll hardly, believe it at the

"Oh, I don't know," Mary began, with a sigh of the baffled hope and the inextinguishable expectation which

"Yes!" said Bessie, with a sigh burlesqued from Mary's. "That is what we all say, and it is certainly the most

maddening of human festivals. I suppose, if we were quite left to ourselves, we shouldn't go; but we seem

never to be, quite. After every Class Day I say to myself that nothing on earth could induce me to go to

another; but when it comes round again, I find myself grasping at any straw of a pretext. I'm pretending now

"Not if I say it, Mary dear. What did I promise you about the pericardiac symptoms? But I feelI feel that if

he asks me I must go. Shouldn't you like to go and see a jay Class Daybe part of it? Think of going once to

the Pi Ute spreador whatever it is! And dancing in their tent! And being left out of the Gym, and Beck!

Yes, I ought to go, so that it can be brought home to me, and I can have a realizing sense of what I am doing,

"Perhaps," Mary Enderby suggested, colorlessly, "he will be devoted to his own people." She had a cold

fascination in the picture Bessie's words had conjured up, and she was saying this less to Bessie than to

"And I should meet themhis mothers and sisters!" Bessie dramatized an excess of anguish. "Oh, Mary, that

is the very thorn I have been trying not to press my heart against; and does your hand commend it to my

embrace? His folks! Yes, they would be folks; and what folks! I think I am getting a realizing sense. Wait!

Don't speak don't move, Molly!" Bessie dropped her chin into her hand, and stared straight forward, gripping

"Must you? Then I shall always say that it was your fault that I couldn't get a realizing sensethat you

prevented me, just when I was about to see myself as others see meas you see me. She's very well!" Bessie

sighed in earnest, and her friend gave her hand a little pressure of true sympathy. "But of course it's rather

"No. We both think it's best to be here when Alan gets back. We want him to go down with us." Bessie had

seldom spoken openly with Mary Enderby about her brother; but that was rather from Mary's shrinking than

her own; she knew that everybody understood his case. She went so far now as to say: "He's ever so much

better than he has been. We have such hopes of him, if he can keep well, when he gets back this time."

"Oh, I know he will," said Mary, fervently. "I'm sure of it. Couldn't we do something for you, Bessie?"

"No, there isn't anything. Butthank you. I know you always think of me, and that's worlds. When are you

"Come in and see meand Alan, if he should be at home. He likes you, and he will be so glad."

Mary kissed Bessie for consent. "You know how much I admire Alan. He could be anything."

Bessie seldom put so much earnest in anything, and Mary loved (as she would have said) the sad sincerity,

Her friend divined that she was no longer speaking wholly of her brother, but she said: "There isn't any if

about it; and there are no ifs about anything if we only think so. It's a sin not to think so."

The mixture of severity and of optimism in the nature of her friend had often amused Bessie, and it did not

escape her tacit notice in even so serious a moment as this. Her theory was that she was shocked to recognize

it now, because of its relation to her brother, but her theories did not always agree with the facts.

That evening, however, she was truly surprised when, after a rather belated ring at the door, the card of Mr.

Thomas Jefferson Durgin came up to her from the receptionroom. Her aunt had gone to bed, and she had a

luxurious moment in which she reaped all the reward of selfdenial by supposing herself to have foregone

the pleasure of seeing him, and sending down word that she was not at home. She did not wish, indeed, to see

him, but she wished to know how he felt warranted in calling in the evening, and it was this unworthy,

curiosity which she stifled for that luxurious moment. The next, with undiminished dignity, she said, "Ask

him to come up, Andrew," and she waited in the library for him to offer a justification of the liberty he had

He offered none whatever, but behaved at once as if he had always had the habit of calling in the evening, or

as if it was a general custom which he need not account for in his own case. He brought her a book which

they had talked of at their last meeting, but he made no excuse or pretext of it.

He said it was a beautiful night, and that he had found it rather warm walking in from Cambridge. The

exercise had moistened his whole rich, red color, and fine drops of perspiration stood on his cleanshaven

upper lip and in the hollow between his under lip and his bold chin; he pushed back the coarse, darkyellow

hair from his forehead with his handkerchief, and let his eyes mock her from under his thick, straw colored

eyebrows. She knew that he was enjoying his own impudence, and he was so handsome that she could not

refuse to enjoy it with him. She asked him if he would not have a fan, and he allowed her to get it for him

"No; but a glass of water, if you please," he said, and Bessie rang and sent for some apollinaris, which Jeff

drank a great goblet of when it came. Then he lay back in the deep chair he had taken, with the air of being

"Are you still a pessimist, Mr. Durgin?" she asked, tentatively, with the effect of innocence that he knew

"It's a man who can't believe all the good he would like, but likes to believe all the good he can."

Bessie said it over, with burlesque thoughtfulness. "There was a girl here today," she said, solemnly, "who

Bessie started. "You're preternatural! But what a pity you should be mistaken. How came you to think of

"Am I putting you on trial now? It's your guilty conscience! Why shouldn't Mary Enderby like you?"

"Oh! And what has that to do with people's liking you? If that was a reason, how many friends do you think

They had come to a little barrier, up that way, and could go no further. Jeff said: "I've just been interviewing

"You're preternatural, too. And you're not mistaken, either. Do you ever go to his studio?"

"No; I haven't been there since he told me it would be of no use to come as a student. He can be terribly

"Nobody knows that better than I do," said Jeff, with a smile for the notion of Westover's frankness as he had

"Oh, that's what they always say. But all the frankness can't be well meant. Why should uncandor be the only

"That's a good idea. I believe I'll put that up on Westover the next time he's frank."

"Oh, I don't know about that." Jeff lay back in his chair at large ease and chuckled. "I should like to tell you

"You know he was up at Lion's Head in February, and got a winter impression of the mountain. Did you see

"We talked about something a great deal more interestingthe impression he got of me."

"Cold enough. He had come to the conclusion that I was very selfish and unworthy; that I used other people

for my own advantage, or let them use themselves; that I was treacherous and vindictive, and if I didn't betray

a man I couldn't be happy till I had beaten him. He said that if I ever behaved well, it came after I had been

"How perfectly fascinating!" Bessie rested her elbow on the corner of the table, and her chin in the palm of

the hand whose thin fingers tapped her red lips; the light sleeve fell down and showed her pretty, lean little

"This is immense," said Bessie. "I hope I'm taking it all in. How came he to give you this flattering little

impression? So hopeful, too! Or, perhaps your frankness doesn't go any farther?"

"Oh, I don't mind saying. He seemed to think it was a sort of abstract duty he owed to my people."

"Yes," said Jeff, with a certain dryness. But as her face looked blankly innocent, he must have decided that

she meant nothing offensive. He relaxed into a broad smile. "It's a queer household up there, in the winter. I

"You couldn't realize it," said Jeff, with a finality that piqued her. He reached out for the bottle of apollinaris,

with somehow the effect of being in another student's room, and poured himself a glass. This would have

amused her, nine times out of ten, but the tenth time had come when she chose to resent it.

"I suppose," she said, "you are all very much excited about Class Day at Cambridge."

"That sounds like a remark made to open the way to conversation." Jeff went on to burlesque a reply in the

same spirit. "Oh, very much so indeed, Miss Lynde! We are all looking forward to it so eagerly. Are you

She rejected his lead with a slight sigh so skilfully drawn that it deceived him when she said, gravely:

"I don't know. It's apt to be a very baffling time at the best. All the men that you like are taken up with their

own people, and even the men that you don't like overvalue themselves, and think they're doing you a favor if

"I suppose, yes, that's what makes me hate it. One doesn't like to have such men do one a favor. And then,

Juniors get younger every year! Even a nice Junior is only a Junior," she concluded, with a sad fall of her

"I don't believe there's a Senior in Harvard that wouldn't forsake his family and come to the rescue if your

feelings could be known," said Jeff. He lifted the bottle at his elbow and found it empty, and this seemed to

"Don't make them known, please," said Bessie. "I shouldn't want an ovation." She sat, after he had risen, as if

she wished to detain him, but when he came up to take leave she had to put her hand in his. She looked at it

there, and so did he; it seemed very little and slim, about onethird the size of his palm, and it seemed to go

to nothing in his grasp. "I should think," she added, "that the jays would have the best time on Class Day. I

should like to dance at one of their spreads, and do everything they did. It would be twice the fun, and there

"Oh, will you?" she said, taking away her hand. "That would be delightful. But what would become of your

folks?" She caught a corner of her mouth with her teeth, as if the word had slipped out.

"How delightful! I don't mean that; but if they're not, and if you really knew some jays, and could get me a

"I think I could manage it for you." He spoke as before, but he looked at her with a mockery in his lips and

eyes as intelligent as her own, and the latent change in his mood gave her the sense of being in the presence

of a vivid emotion. She rose in her excitement; she could see that he admired her, and was enjoying her

insolence too, in a way, though in a way that she did not think she quite understood; and she had the wish to

She let a light of laughter come into her eyes, of harmless mischief played to an end. "I don't deserve your

"Ah, I see you're hurt at my joking, and I'm awfully sorry. I wish there was some way of making you forgive

me. But it couldn't be that alone," she went on rather aimlessly as to her words, trusting to his answer for

some leading, and willing meanwhile to prolong the situation for the effect in her nerves. It had been a very

dull and tedious day, and she was finding much more than she could have expected in the mingled fear and

slight which he inspired her with in such singular measure. These feminine subtleties of motive are beyond

any but the finest natures in the other sex, and perhaps all that Jeff perceived was the note of insincerity in her

"What I've said," she ventured, letting her eyes fall; but they were not eyes that fell effectively, and she

"You haven't said anything, and if you've thought anything, what have I got to do with that? I think all sorts

"Oh, do sit down and tell me the kind of things you think about me!" Bessie implored, sinking back into her

"Don't try to do each other good, unless they're cranks like Lancaster, or bores like Mrs. Bevidge"

He laughed. Her comedy was delicious to him. He had never found, anybody so amusing; he almost

"If that is your opinion of me, Mr. Durgin," she said, very gravely, "I am sorry. May I remark that I don't see

"I can tell you," said Jeff, and he advanced upon her where she sat so abruptly that she started and shrank

back in her chair. "I come because you've got brains, and you're the only girl that hashere." They were

Alan's words, almost his words, and for an instant she thought of her brother, end wondered what he would

think of this jay's praising her in his terms. "Because," Jeff went on, "you've got more sense and nonsense

than all the women here put together. Because it's better than a play to hear you talkand act; and

He put out his hand, but she did not take it as she rose haughtily. "We've said goodnight once. I prefer to say

goodbye this time. I'm sure you will understand why after this I cannot see you again." She seemed to

"No, I don't understand," he answered, coolly; "but it isn't necessary I should; and I'm quite willing to say

goodbye, if you prefer. You haven't been so frank with me as I have with you; but that doesn't make any

difference; perhaps you never meant to be, or couldn't be, if you meant. Goodbye." He bowed and turned

"Oh, very well!" Jeff took her hands and put them both in the hold of one of his large, strong bands. Then,

with the contact, it came to him, from a varied experience of girls in his rustic past, that this young lady, who

was nothing but a girl after all, was playing her comedy with a certain purpose, however little she might

know it or own it. He put his other large, strong hand upon her waist, and pulled her to him and kissed her.

Another sort of man, no matter what he had believed of her, would have felt his act a sacrilege then and there.

Jeff only knew that she had not made the faintest straggle against him; she had even trembled toward him,

and he brutally exulted in the belief that he had done what she wished, whether it was what she meant or not.

She, for her part, realized that she had been kissed as once she had happened to see one of the maids kissed

by the grocer's boy at the basement door. In an instant this man had abolished all her defences of family, of

society, of personality, and put himself on a level with her in the most sacred things of life. Her mind grasped

the fact and she realized it intellectually, while as yet all her emotions seemed paralyzed. She did not know

whether she resented it as an abominable outrage or not; whether she hated the man for it or not. But perhaps

he was in love with her, and his love overpowered him; in that case she could forgive him, if she were in love

with him. She asked herself whether she was, and whether she had betrayed herself to him so that he was

somehow warranted in what he did. She wondered if another sort of man would have done it, a gentleman,

who believed she was in love with him. She wondered if she were as much shocked as she was astonished.

She knew that there was everything in the situation to make the fact shocking, but she got no distinct reply

It ought to be known, and known at once; she ought to tell her brother, as soon as she saw him; she thought of

telling her aunt, and she fancied having to shout the affair into her ear, and having to repeat, "He kissed me!

Don't you understand? Kissed me!" Then she reflected with a start that she could never tell any one, that in

the midst of her world she was alone in relation to this; she was as helpless and friendless as the poorest and

lowliest girl could be. She was more so, for if she were like the maid whom the grocer's boy kissed she would

be of an order of things in which she could advise with some one else who had been kissed; and she would

She asked herself whether she was at all moved at heart; till now it seemed to her that it had not been

different with her toward him from what it had been toward all the other men whose meaning she would have

liked to find out. She had not in the least respected them, and she did not respect him; but if it happened

because he was overcome by his love for her, and could not help it, then perhaps she must forgive him

These ideas presented themselves with the simultaneity of things in a dream in that instant when she lingered

helplessly in his hold, and she even wondered if by any chance Andrew had seen them; but she heard his step

on the floor below; and at the same time it appeared to her that she must be in love with this man if she did

Westover was sitting at an open window of his studio smoking out into the evening air, and looking down

into the thinly foliaged tops of the public garden, where the electrics fainted and flushed and hissed. Cars

trooped by in the troubled street, scraping the wires overhead that screamed as if with pain at the touch of

their trolleys, and kindling now and again a soft planet, as the trolleys struck the batlike plates that connected

the crossing lines. The painter was getting almost as much pleasure out of the planets as pain out of the

screams, and he was in an afterdinner languor in which he was very reluctant to recognize a step, which he

thought he knew, on his stairs and his stairslanding. A knock at his door followed the sound of the

approaching steps. He lifted himself, and called out, inhospitably, "Come in!" and, as he expected, Jeff

Durgin came in. Westover's meetings with him had been an increasing discomfort since his return from

Lion's Head. The uneasiness which he commonly felt at the first moment of encounter with him yielded less

and less to the influence of Jeff's cynical bonhomie, and it returned in force as soon as they parted.

It was rather dim in the place, except for the light thrown up into it from the turmoil of lights outside, but he

could see that there was nothing of the smiling mockery on Jeff's face which habitually expressed his inner

"I'm going up there tomorrow. I've got to see Cynthia, and tell her what I've been doing."

Westover waited a moment before he asked: "Do you want me to ask what you've been doing?"

"No!" shouted Jeff. "It's the worst thing yet, I guess you'll think. I couldn't have believed it myself, if I hadn't

been through it. I shouldn't have supposed I was such a fool. I don't care for the girl; I never did."

"Cynthia? No! Miss Lynde. Oh, try to take it in!" Jeff cried, with a laugh at the daze in Westover's face. "You

must have known about the flirtation; if you haven't, you're the only one." His vanity in the fact betrayed

itself in his voice. "It came to a crisis last week, and we tried to make each other believe that we were in

Westover did not speak. He could not make out whether he was surprised or whether he was shocked, and it

seemed to him that he was neither surprised nor shocked. He wondered whether he had really expected

something of the kind, sooner or later, or whether he was not always so apprehensive of some deviltry in

Durgin that nothing he did could quite take him unawares. At last he said: "I suppose it's trueeven though

"That's something like," said Jeff, as if the contempt gave him a sort of pleasure; and his heavy face lighted

"I'm going to break with her. I don't care for herthat!" He snapped his fingers. "I told her I cared because

"Ah!" said Westover. "You put it on her!" But he waited for Durgin's justification with a dread that he should

"Pshaw! What's the use? It's been a game from the beginning, and a question which should ruin. I won. She

meant to throw me over, if the time came for her, but it came for me first, and it's only a question now which

shall break first; we've both been near it once or twice already. I don't mean she shall get the start of me."

Westover had a glimpse of the innate enmity of the sexes in this game; of its presence in passion that was

lived and of its prevalence in passion that was played. But the fate of neither gambler concerned him; he was

impatient of his interest in what Jeff now went on to tell him, without scruple concerning her, or palliation of

himself. He scarcely realized that he was listening, but afterward he remembered it all, with a little pity for

Bessie and none for Jeff, but with more shame for her, too. Love seems more sacredly confided to women

than to men; it is and must be a higher and finer as well as a holier thing with them; their blame for its

betrayal must always be the heavier. He had sometimes suspected Bessie's willingness to amuse herself with

Jeff, as with any other man who would let her play with him; and he would not have relied upon anything in

At the end of Durgin's story he merely asked: "And what are you going to do about Cynthia?"

Westover rose, but Jeff remained sitting where he had put himself astride of a chair, with his face over the

back. The painter walked slowly up and down before him in the capricious play of the street light. He turned

"Oh! You want my advice?" Westover still felt physically incapable of the indignation which he strongly

imagined. "I don't know what to say to you, Durgin. You transcend my powers. Are you able to see this

"I guess so," Jeff answered. "I don't idealize it, though. I look at facts; they're bad enough. You don't suppose

"I don't believe I care for Miss Lynde any more than I care for you. But I believe I wish you were not going

"Because you and she are fit for each other. If you want my advice, I advise you to be true to herif you

"You're not fit for her. You couldn't do a crueler thing for her than to keep faith with her."

Jeff seemed puzzled by Westover's attitude, which was either too sincere or too ironical for him. He pushed

his hat, which he had kept on, back from his forehead. "Damned if I don't believe she would," he mused

aloud. The notion seemed to flatter him and repay him for what he must have been suffering. He smiled, but

he said: "She wouldn't do, even if she were any good. Cynthia is worth a million of her. If she wants to give

me up after she knows all about me, well and good. I shu'n't blame her. But I shall give her a fair chance, and

"Well, you can't, on my account," Durgin allowed. "But you do care on her account."

"Yes, I do," said Westover, sitting down again, and he did not say anything more.

Durgin waited a long while for him to speak before he asked: " Then that's really your advice, is it?"

Jeff was silent in his turn. He started from his silence with a laugh. "She'd make a daisy landlady for Lion's

Head. I believe she would like to try it awhile just for the fun. But after the ball was overwell, it would be

a good joke, if it was a joke. Cynthia is a womanshe a'n't any corpselight. She understands me, and she

don't overrate me, either. She knew just how much I was worth, and she took me at her own valuation. I've

got my way in life marked out, and she believes in it as much as I do. If anybody can keep me level and make

the best of me, she can, and she's going to have the chance, if she wants to. I'm going to act square with her

about the whole thing. I guess she's the best judge in a case like this, and I shall lay the whole case before her,

don't you be afraid of that. And she's got to have a free field. Why, even if there wa'n't any question of her,"

he went on, falling more and more into his vernacular, "I don't believe I should care in the long run for this

other one. We couldn't make it go for any time at all. She wants excitement, and after the summer folks began

to leave, and we'd been to Florida for a winter, and then came back to Lion's Headwell! This planet hasn't

got excitement enough in it for that girl, and I doubt if the solar system has. At any rate, I'm not going to act

"I see," said Westover, "that you've been reasoning it all out, and I'm not surprised that you've kept your own

advantage steadily in mind. I don't suppose you know what a savage you are, and I don't suppose I could

teach you. I sha'n't try, at any rate. I'll take you on your own ground, and I tell you again you had better break

with Cynthia. I won't say that it's what you owe her, for that won't have any effect with you, but it's what you

"Oh yes, you can," Jeff interrupted, with a sneering laugh. "How do you suppose all the big fortunes were

"No. But you're an unlucky man if life hasn't taught you that you must pay in suffering of some kind, sooner

"Now that's one of your oldfashioned superstitions, Mr. Westover," said Jeff, with a growing kindliness in

his tone, as if the pathetic delusion of such a man really touched him. "You pay, or you don't pay, just as it

happens. If you get hit soon after you've done wrong, you think it's retribution, and if it holds off till you've

forgotten all about it, you think it's a strange Providence, and you puzzle over it, but you don't reform. You

keep right along in the old way. Prosperity and adversity, they've got nothing to do with conduct. If you're a

strong man, you get there, and if you're a weak man, all the righteousness in the universe won't help you. But

I propose to do what's right about Cynthia, and not what's wrong; and according to your own theory, of

lifewhich won't hold water a minuteI ought to be blessed to the third and fourth generation. I don't look

for that, though. I shall be blessed if I look out for myself ; and if I don't, I shall suffer for my want of

foresight. But I sha'n't suffer for anything else. Well, I'm going to cut some of my recitations, and I'm going

up to Lion's Head, tomorrow, to settle my business with Cynthia. I've got a little business to look after here

with some one else first, and I guess I shall have to be about it. I don't know which I shall like the best." He

rose, and went over to where Westover was sitting, and held out his hand to him.

"What is it, Jeff?" asked Cynthia, the next night, as they started out together after supper, and began to stroll

down the hill toward her father's house. It lay looking very little and low in the nook at the foot of the lane,

on the verge of the woods that darkened away to the northward from it, under the glassy night sky, lit with the

spare young moon. The peeping of the frogs in the marshy places filled the air; the hoarse voice of the brook

"It's not so warm here, quite, as it is in Boston," he returned. "Are you wrapped up enough? This air has an

"You think there's something? You don't believe I've come up for rest over Sunday ? I guess mother herself

didn't, and I could see your father following up my little lies as if he wa'n't going to let one escape him. Well,

She pulled her hand out of his arm, which she had taken, and halted him by her abrupt pause. "You're not

"I'm all right on my conditions," said Jeff, with forlorn derision. "You'll have to guess again." He stood

looking back over his shoulder at her face, which showed white in the moonlight, swathed airily round in the

"Oh, you splendid girl! The trouble's over, but it's something you can't stand by me in, I guess. You know that

"Come on! We can't stay here talking. Let's go down and sit on your porch." She mechanically obeyed him,

and they started on together down the hill again; but she did not offer to take his arm, and he kept the width

"Last night I ended up the flirtation I've been carrying on with her ever since."

"I mean that last week I got engaged to her, and last night I broke with her." Cynthia seemed to stumble on

something; he sprang over and caught. her, and now she put her hand in his arm, and stayed herself by him as

"No!" She stopped, and then she asked, with a kind of gentle bewilderment: "What did you want to tell me

"Yes, more than ever I did. But I'm not fit for you, Cynthia. Mr. Westover said I wasn't. I told him about

"He told me to stick to her. He was right about you, Cynthy. I'm not fit for you, and that's a fact."

"What was it about that girl? Tell me everything." She spoke in a tone of plaintive entreaty, very unlike the

command she once used with Jeff when she was urging him to be frank with her and true to himself. They

had come to her father's house and she freed her hand from his arm again, and sat down on the step before the

"Why," Jeff began, harshly, and with a note of scorn for himself and his theme in his voice, "there isn't any

more of it, but there's no end to her. I promised Mr. Westover I shouldn't whitewash myself, and I sha'n't. I've

been behaving badly, and it's no excuse for me because she wanted me to. I began to go for her as soon as I

saw that she wanted me to, and that she liked the excitement. The excitement is all that she cared for; she

didn't care for me except for the excitement of it. She thought she could have fun with me, and then throw me

over; but I guess she found her match. You couldn't understand such a girl, and I don't brag of it. All she

cared for was to flirt with me, and she liked it all the more because I was a jay and she could get something

new out of it. I can't explain it; but I could see it right along. She fooled herself more than she fooled me."

"No!" shouted Jeff." She wasn't goodlooking at all. She was dark and thin, and she had little slanting eyes;

but she was graceful, and she knew how to make herself go further than any girl I ever saw. If she came into a

room, she made you look at her, or you had to somehow. She was bright, too; and she had more sense than all

the other girls there put together. But she was a fool, all the same." Jeff paused. "Is that enough?"

"No, it isn't all. We didn't meet much at first, but I got to walking home with her from some teas; and then we

met at a big ball. I danced with her the whole while nearly, andand I took her brother homePshaw! He

was drunk; and Iwell, he had got drunk drinking with me at the ball. The wine didn't touch me, but it

turned his head; and I took him home; he's a drunkard, anyway. She let us in when we got to their house, and

that kind of made a tie between us. She pretended to think she was under obligations to me, and so I got to

"I wanted to break with her. I wanted to stop it, once for all, and I thought that would do it, if anything

Jeff checked himself in a sort of retrospective laugh. "I'm not so sure. I guess she liked the excitement of that,

too. You couldn't understand the kind of girl she She wanted to flirt with me that night I brought him home

"I don't believe it." Cynthia rose from the step, where she had been sitting, as if with renewed strength. "Go

up and tell father to come down here. I want to see him." She turned and put her hand on the latch of the

"You're not going in there, Cynthia," said Jeff. "It must be like death in there."

"It's more like death out here. But if it's the cold you mean, you needn't be troubled. We've had a fire today,

"I don't know, yet. If I said anything now, I should tell you what Mr. Westover did: go back to that girl, if

she'll let you. You're fit for each other, as he said. Did you tell her that you were engaged to some one else?"

"But before that she didn't know how false you were. Well, you're not fit for her, then; you're not good

She opened the door and went in, closing it after her. Jeff turned and walked slowly away; then he came

quickly back, as if he were going to follow her within. But through the window he saw her as she stood by

the table with a lamp in her hand. She had turned up the light, which shone full in her face and revealed its

severe beauty broken and writhen with the effort to repress her weeping. He might not have minded the

severity or the beauty, but the pathos was more than he could stand. "Oh, Lord!" he said, with a shrug, and he

When Whitwell faced his daughter in the little sittingroom, whose low ceiling his hat almost touched as he

stood before her, the storm had passed with her, and her teardrenched visage wore its wonted look of still

"No. But I knew it was trouble," said Whitwell, with a dignity which his sympathy for her gave a

"I guess you were right about him," she resumed: She went on to tell in brief the story that Jeff had told her.

Her father did not interrupt her, but at the end he said, inadequately: "He's a comical devil. I knew about his

"He didn't offer to," Whitwell explained. "I got it out of him in spite of him, I guess." He had sat down with

his hat on, as his absentminded habit was, and he now braced his knees against the edge of the table.

Cynthia sat across it from him with her head drooped over it, drawing vague figures on the board with her

"I guess you don't quite realize it yet," her father suggested, tenderly. "Well, I don't want to hurry you any.

"Well, it's a pootty plain case, that's a fact," Whitwell conceded. She was silent, and he asked: "How did he

"It's what he came up for. He began to tell me at once. I was certain there was some trouble."

"It was his. But Mr. Westover told him to break off with me, and keep on with her, if she would let him."

"I guess that was pootty good advice," said Whitwell, letting his face betray his humorous relish of it. "I

"Well, I guess that's so, too," her father assented. "'Ta'n't so much of a muchness as you might think, in that

After a moment the girl asked, forlornly: " What should you do, father, if you were in my place?"

"Well, there I guess you got me, Cynthy," said her father. "I don't believe 't any man, I don't care how old he

is, or how much experience he's had, knows exactly how a girl feels about a thing like this, or has got any call

to advise her. Of course, the way I feel is like takin' the top of his head off. But I d' know," he added, "as that

would do a great deal of good, either. I presume a woman's got rather of a chore to get along with a man,

anyway. We a'n't any of us much to brag on. It's out o' sight, out o' mind, with the best of us, I guess."

"There a'n't many men like Mr. Westoverwell, not a great many; or Jackson, either. Time! I wish Jackson

was home! He'd know how to straighten this thing out, and he wouldn't weaken over Jeff muchwell, not

much. But he a'n't here, and you've got to act for yourself. The way I look at it is this: you took Jeff when you

knowed what a comical devil he was, and I presume you ha'n't got quite the same right to be disappointed in

what he done as if you hadn't knowed. Now mind, I a'n't excusin' him. But if you knowed he was the feller to

"I know what you mean, father," said the girl, "and I don't want to shirk my responsibility. It was everything

"Well," said Whitwell, impartially, "as far forth as that goes, I don't think he's strained himself. He'd know

you would hear of it sooner or later anyway, and he ha'n't just found out that he was goin' wrong. Been

keepin' it up for the last three months, and writin' you all the while them letters you was so crazy to get."

"Yes," sighed the girl. "But we've got to be just to his disposition as well as his actions. I can see it in one

light that can excuse it some. He can't bear to be put down, and I know he's been left out a good deal among

the students, and it's made him bitter. He told me about it; that's one reason why he wanted to leave Harvard

this last year. He saw other young men made much of, when he didn't get any notice; and when he had the

chance to pay them back with a girl of their own set that was trying to make a fool of him"

Cynthia broke under the defence she was trying to make. "Yes," she said, with an indrawn sigh, and she

The sight of her grief seemed to kindle her father's wrath to a flame. "Any way you look at him, he's been a

dumn blackguard; that's what he's been. You're a million times too good for him; and I"

She sobbed herself quiet, and then she said: "Father, I don't like to go up there tonight. I want to stay here."

"All right, Cynthia. I'll come down and stay with you. You got everything we want here?"

"Yes. And I'll go up and get the breakfast for them in the morning. There won't be much to do."

"And, father," the girl went on as if he had not spoken, "don't you talk to Mrs. Durgin about it, will you?"

"No, no. I sha'n't speak to her. I'll just tell Frank you and me are goin' to stay down here tonight. She'll

suspicion something, but she can figure it out for herself. Or she can make Jeff tell her. It can't be kept from

"Well, let him be the one to tell her. Whatever happens, I shall never speak of it to a soul besides you."

All right, Cynthy. You'll have the night to think it overI guess you won't sleep muchand I'll trust you to

Cynthia found Mrs. Durgin in the old farmhouse kitchen at work getting breakfast when she came up to the

hotel in the morning. She was early, but the elder woman had been earlier still, and her heavy face showed

Cynthia was unrolling the cloud from her hair. She said, as she tied on her apron: "You must get him to tell

Cynthia stooped to open the oven door, and to turn the pan of biscuit she found inside. She shut the door

sharply to, and said, as she rose: "I don't want to tell anything about it, and I sha'n't, Mrs. Durgin. He can do

"Yes; you seem to make it better than I do. Do you think I shouldn't believe you was fair to him?"

"I wasn't thinking of that. But it's his secret. If he wants to keep it, he can keep it, for all me."

"I don't know." Cynthia turned away with a trembling chin, and began to beat the coffee up with an egg she

had dropped into the pot. She put the breakfast on the table when it was ready, but she would not sit down

with the rest. She said she did not want any breakfast, and she drank a cup of coffee in the kitchen.

It fell to Jeff mainly to keep the talk going. He had been out at the barn with Jombateeste since daybreak,

looking after the cattle, and the joy of the weather had got into his nerves and spirits. At first he had lain

awake after he went to bed, but he had fallen asleep about midnight, and got a good night's rest. He looked

fresh and strong and very handsome. He talked resolutely to every one at the table, but Jombateeste was

always preoccupied with eating at his meals, and Frank Whitwell had on a Sunday silence, which was

perhaps deepened by a feeling that there was something wrong between his sister and Jeff, and it would be

rash to commit himself to an open friendliness until he understood the case. His father met Jeff's advances

with philosophical blandness and evasion, and Mrs. Durgin was provisionally dry and severe both with the

Whitwells and her son. After breakfast she went to the parlor, and Jeff set about a tour of the hotel, inside and

out. He looked carefully to the details of its winter keeping. Then he came back and boldly joined his mother

where she sat before her stove, whose subdued heat she found pleasant in the lingering cold of the early

He tossed his hat on the table beside her, and sat down on the other side of the stove. "Well, I must say the

place has been well looked after. I don't believe Jackson himself could have kept it in better shape. When was

"I hope," said his mother, gravely, "you've been lookin' after your end at Boston, too."

"Well, not as well as you have here, mother," said Jeff, candidly. "Has Cynthy told you?"

"There's a lot; but I guess I needn't go over it all. I've been playing the devil."

"Yes, I have. I've been going with another girl down there, one the kind you wanted me to make up to, and I

went so far Iwell, I made love to her; and then I thought it over, and found out I didn't really care for her,

and I had to tell her so, and then I came up to tell Cynthy. That's about the size of it. What do you think of

"She said I'd better go back to the other girl." Jeff laughed hardily, but his mother remained impassive.

"That seems to be the general opinion. That's what Mr. Westover advised. I seem to be the only one against

it. I suppose you mean that I'm not fit for Cynthy. I don't deny it. All I say is I want her, and I don't want the

"The way I should look at it," said his mother, "is this: whatever you are, Cynthy made you. You was a lazy,

disobedient, worthless boy, and it was her carin' for you from the first that put any spirit and any principle

into you. It was her that helped you at school when you was little things together; and she helped you at the

academy, and she's helped you at college. I'll bet she could take a degree, or whatever it is, at Harvard better

than you could now; and if you ever do take a degree, you've got her to thank for it."

"That's so," said Jeff. "And what's the reason you didn't want me to marry her when I came in here last

"You know well enough what the reason was. It was part of the same thing as my wantin' you to be a lawyer;

but I might knowed that if you didn't have Cynthy to go into court with you, and put the words into your

mouth, you wouldn't make a speech that would"Mrs. Durgin paused for a fitting figure"save a flea from

Jeff burst into a laugh. "Well, I guess that's so, mother. And now you want me to throw away the only chance

I've got of learning how to run Lion's Head in the right way by breaking with Cynthy."

"Nobody wants you to run Lion's Head for a while yet," his mother returned, scornfully. "Jackson is going to

run Lion's Head. He'll be home the end of June, and I'll run Lion's Head till he gets here. You talk," she went

on, "as if it was in your hands to break with Cynthy, or throw away the chance with her. The way I look at it,

she's broke with you, and you ha'n't got any chance with her. Oh, Jeff," she suddenly appealed to him, "tell

me all about it! What have you been up to? If I understood it once, I know I can make her see it in the right

"The better you understand it, mother, the less you'll like it; and I guess Cynthy sees it in the right light

"Well, that's like Cynthy. I'll tell you, then," said Jeff; and he told his mother his whole affair with Bessie

Lynde. He had to be very elemental, and he was aware, as he had never been before, of the difference

between Bessie's world and his mother's world, in trying to make Bessie's world conceivable to her.

He was patient in going over every obscure point, and illustrating from the characters and condition of

different summer folks the facts of Bessie's entourage. It is doubtful, however, if he succeeded in conveying

to his mother a clear and just notion of the purely chic nature of the girl. In the end she seemed to conceive of

her simply as a hussy, and so pronounced her, without limit or qualification, in spite of Jeff's laughing

attempt to palliate her behavior, and to inculpate himself. She said she did not see what he had done that was

so much out of the way. That thing had led him on from the beginning; she had merely got her

comeuppings, when all was said. Mrs. Durgin believed Cynthia would look at it as she did, if she could

have it put before her rightly. Jeff shook his head with persistent misgiving. His notion was that Cynthia saw

the affair only too clearly, and that there was no new light to be thrown on it from her point of view. Mrs.

Durgin would not allow this; she was sure that she could bring Cynthia round; and she asked Jeff whether it

was his getting that fellow drunk that she seemed to blame him for the most. He answered that he thought

that was pretty bad, but he did not believe that was the worst thing in Cynthia's eyes. He did not forbid his

mother's trying to do what she could with her, and he went away for a walk, and left the house to the two

women. Jombateeste was in the barn, which he preferred to the house, and Frank Whitwell had gone to

church over at the Huddle. As Jeff passed Whitwell's cottage in setting out on his stroll he saw the

philosopher through the window, seated with his legs on the table, his hat pushed back, and his spectacles

There was still plenty of snow on the upper slopes of the hills, and there was a drift here and there in a corner

of pasture wall in the valley; but the springtime green was beginning to hover over the wet places in the

fields; the catkins silvered the golden tracery of the willow branches by the brook; there was a buzz of bees

about them, and about the maples, blackened by the earlier flow of sap through the holes in the bark made by

the woodpeckers' bills. Now and then the tremolo of a bluebird shook in the tender light and the keen air. At

one point in the road where the sun fell upon some young pines in a sheltered spot a balsamic odor exhaled

These gentle sights and sounds and odors blended in the influence which Jeff's spirit felt more and more. He

realized that he was a blot on the loveliness of the morning. He had a longing to make atonement and to win

forgiveness. His heart was humbled toward Cynthia, and he went wondering how his mother would make it

out with her, and how, if she won him any advantage, he should avail himself of it and regain the girl's trust;

he had no doubt of her love. He perceived that there was nothing for him hereafter but the most perfect

At a turn of his road where it branched toward the Huddle a group of young girls stood joking and laughing;

before Jeff came up with them they separated, and all but one continued on the way beyond the turning. She

She blushed and bridled at his bow and at his beauty and splendor, and in her embarrassment pertly said that

she did not suppose he would have remembered her. She was very young, but at fifteen a country girl is not

Jeff answered that he should have known her anywhere, in spite of her looking so much older than she did in

the summer when she had come with berries to the hotel. He said she must be feeling herself quite a young

lady now, in her long dresses, and he praised the dress which she had on. He said it became her style; and he

found such relief from his heavy thoughts in these harmless pleasantries that he kept on with them. He had

involuntarily turned with her to walk back to her house on the way he had come, and he asked her if he might

not carry her catkins for her. She had a sheaf of them in the hollow of her slender arm, which seemed to him

very pretty, and after a little struggle she yielded them to him. The struggle gave him still greater relief from

his selfreproach, and at her gate he begged her to let him keep one switch of the pussywillows, and he stood

a moment wondering whether he might not ask her for something else. She chose one from the bundle, and

drew it lightly across his face before she put it in his hand. "You may have this for Cynthy," she said, and she

Cynthia did not appear at dinner, and Jeff asked his mother when he saw her alone if she had spoken to the

"All right," he returned. "I'm going to take a nap; I believe I feel as if I hadn't slept for a month."

He slept the greater part of the afternoon, and came down rather dull to the early tea. Cynthia was absent

again, and his mother was silent and wore a troubled look. Whitwell was full of a novel conception of the

agency of hypnotism in interpreting the life of the soul as it is intimated in dreams. He had been reading a

book that affirmed the consubstantiality of the sleepdream and the hypnotic illusion. He wanted to know if

Jeff, down at Boston, had seen anything of the hypnotic doings that would throw light on this theory.

It was still full light when they rose from the table, and it was scarcely twilight when Jeff heard Cynthia

letting herself out at the back door. He fancied her going down to her father's house, and he went out to the

corner of the hotel to meet her. She faltered a moment at sight of him, and then kept on with averted face.

He joined her, and walked beside her. "Well, Cynthy, what are you going to say to me? I'm off for Cambridge

again tomorrow morning, and I suppose we've got to understand each other. I came up here to put myself in

your hands, to keep or to throw away, just as you please. Well? Have you thought about it?"

"Oh yes, it could. Now that's just where you're mistaken. That's where a woman never can understand a man.

I might carry on with half a dozen girls, and yet never forget you, or think less of you, although I could see all

the time how pretty and bright every one of 'em was. That's the way a man's mind is built. It's curious, but it's

"Oh, come, now! You don't mean that. You know I was just joking; you know I don't justify what I've done,

and I don't excuse it. But I think I've acted pretty square with you about itabout telling you, I mean. I don't

want to lay any claim, but you remember when you made me promise that if there was anything shady I

"Yes," said Cynthia, and she pulled the cloud over the side of her face next to him, and walked a little faster.

He hastened his steps to keep up with her. "Cynthy, if you put your arms round me, as you did then"

"Yes, I do! But you don't want me to, as you did then. Do you?" She stopped abruptly and faced him full.

"You don't," said the girl, "for you know that if you did, I would do it." She began to walk on again. "It

wouldn't be hard for me to forgive you anything you've done against meor against yourself; I should care

for you the sameif you were the same person; but you're not the same, and you know it. I told you

thenthat time that I didn't want to make you do what you knew was right, and I never shall try to do it

again. I'm sorry I did it then. I was wrong. And I should be afraid of you if I did now. Some time you would

make me suffer for it, just as you've made me suffer for making you do then what was right."

It struck Jeff as a very curious fact that Cynthia must always have known him better than he knew himself in

some ways, for he now perceived the truth and accuracy of her words. He gave her mind credit for the

penetration due her heart; he did not understand that it is through their love women divine the souls of men.

What other witnesses of his character had slowly and carefully reasoned out from their experience of him she

He was silent, and then, with rare gravity, he said, "Cynthia, I believe you're right," and he never knew how

her heart leaped toward him at his words. "I'm a pretty bad chap, I guess. But I want you to give me another

chance and I'll try not to make you pay for it, either," he added, with a flicker of his saucy humor.

"I'll give you a chance, then," she said, and she shrank from the hand he put out toward her. "Go back and tell

"Is that what you call a chance?" demanded Jeff, between anger and injury. For an instant he imagined her

"It's the only one I can give you. She's never tried to make you do what was right, and you'll never be tempted

"You're pretty rough on me, Cynthy," Jeff protested, almost plaintively. He asked, more in character: " Ain't

"Did you suppose I didn't mean that you were free? That I would put a lie in your mouth for you to be true

"I care for you, but it can never be the same as it was before. What you've done, you've done. I wish I could

help it, but I can't. I can't make myself over into what I was twentyfour hours ago. I seem another person, in

another world; it's as if I died, and came to life somewhere else. I'm sorry enough, if that could help, but it

can't. Go and tell that girl the truth: that you came up here to me, and I sent you back to her."

A gleam of amusement visited Jeff in the gloom where he seemed to be darkling. He fancied doing that very

thing with Bessie Lynde, and the wild joy she would snatch from an experience so unique, so impossible.

"I suppose," said Jeff, sulkily, "you'll let me go away and do as I please, if I'm free."

"Oh yes. I don't want you to do anything because I told you. I won't make that mistake again. Go and do what

you are able to do of your own free will. You know what you ought to do as well as I do; and you know a

They had reached Cynthia's house, and they were talking at the side door, as they had the night before, when

there had been hope for her in the newness of her calamity, before she had yet fully imagined it.

"All right. Goodbye, then." He held out his hand, and she put hers in it for the moment he chose to hold it.

Cynthia was still lying with her face in her pillow when her father came into the dark little house, and peered

into her room with the newly lighted lamp in his hand. She turned her face quickly over and looked at him

"Well, I'm satisfied," said Whitwell. "If you could ha' made it up, so you could ha' felt right about it, I

shouldn't ha' had anything to say against it, but I'm glad it's turned out the way it has. He's a comical devil,

and he always was, and I'm glad you a'n't takin' on about him any more. You used to have so much spirit

"I've been thinking," said the girl, after a little pause, " that we shall have to go away from here."

"Yes, yes. We must! Don't make one talk about it. We'll stay here till Jackson gets back in June, and

thenwe must go somewhere else. We'll go down to Boston, and I'll try to get a place to teach, or

"Father!" cried the girl, with an energy that startled him, as she lifted herself on her elbow. "Don't ever think

of troubling Mr. Westover! Oh," she lamented, "I was thinking of troubling him myself! But we mustn't, we

"Well," said Whitwell, "time enough to think about all that. We got two good months yet to plan it out before

Jackson gets back, and I guess we can think of something before that. I presume," he added, thoughtfully,

"that when Mrs. Durgin hears that you've give Jeff the sack, she'll make consid'able of a kick. She done it

After he went back to Cambridge, Jeff continued mechanically in the direction given him by motives which

had ceased for him. In the midst of his divergence with Bessie Lynde he had still kept an inner fealty to

Cynthia, and tried to fulfil the purposes and ambition she had for him. The operation of this habitual

allegiance now kept him up to his work, but the time must come when it could no longer operate, when his

whole consciousness should accept the fact known to his intelligence, and he should recognize the close of

that incident of his life as the bereaved finally accept and recognize the fact of death.

The event brought him relief, and it brought him freedom. He was sensible in his relaxation of having

strained up to another's ideal, of having been hampered by another's will. His pleasure in the relief was

tempered by a regret, not wholly unpleasant, for the girl whose aims, since they were no longer his, must be

disappointed. He was sorry for Cynthia, and in his remorse he was fonder of her than he had ever been. He

felt her magnanimity and clemency; he began to question, in that wordless deep of being where volition

begins, whether it would not be paying a kind of duty to her if he took her at her word and tried to go back to

Bessie Lynde. But for the present he did nothing but renounce all notion of working at his conditions, or

attempting to take a degree. That was part of a thing that was past, and was no part of anything to come, so

He did not choose to report himself to Westover, and risk a scolding, or a snubbing. He easily forgave

Westover for the tone he had taken at their last meeting, but he did not care to see him. He would have met

him halfway, however, in a friendly advance, and he was aware of much goodwill toward him, which he

Jeff missed Cynthia's letters which used to come so regularly every Tuesday, and he had a halfhour every

Sunday which was at first rather painfully vacant since he no longer wrote to her. But in this vacancy he had

at least no longer the pang of selfreproach which her letters always brought him, and he was not obliged to

put himself to the shame of concealment in writing to her. He had never minded that tacit lying on his own

account, but he hated it in relation to her; it always hurt him as something incongruous and unfit. He wrote to

his mother now on Sunday, and in his first letter, while the impression of Cynthia's dignity and generosity

was still vivid, he urged her to make it clear to the girl that he wished her and her family to remain at Lion's

Head as if nothing had happened. He put a great deal of real feeling into this request, and he offered to go and

spend a year in Europe, if his mother thought that Cynthia would be more reconciled to his coming back at

His mother answered with a dryness to which his ear supplied the tones of her voice, that she would try to get

along in the management of Lion's Head till his brother got back, but that she had no objection to his going to

Europe for a year if he had the money to spare. Jeff could not refuse her joke, as he felt it, a certain applause,

but he thought it pretty rough that his mother should take part so decidedly against him as she seemed to be

doing. He had expected her to be angry with him, but before they parted she had seemed to find some excuse

for him, and yet here she was siding against her own son in what he might very well consider an unnatural

way. If Jackson had been at home he would have laid it to his charge; but he knew that Cynthia would have

scorned even to speak of him with his mother, and he knew too well his mother's slight for Whitwell to

suppose that he could have influenced her. His mind turned in momentary suspicion to Westover. Had

Westover, he wondered, with a purpose to pay him up for it forming itself simultaneously with his question,

been setting his mother against him? She might have written to Westover to get at the true inwardness of his

behavior, and Westover might have written her something that had made her harden her heart against him.

But upon reflection this seemed out of character for both of them; and Jeff was thrown back upon his

mother's sober second thought of his misconduct for an explanation of her coldness. He could not deny that

he had grievously disappointed her in several ways. But he did not see why he should not take a certain hint

from her letter, or construct a hint from it, at one with a vague intent prompted by his own restless and

curious vanity. Since he had parted with Bessie Lynde, on terms of humiliation for her which must have been

anguish for him if he had ever loved her, or loved anything but his power over her, he had remained in

absolute ignorance of her. He had not heard where she was or how she was; but now, as the few weeks before

Class Day and Commencement crumbled away, he began to wonder why she made no sign. He believed that

since she had been willing to go so far to get him, she would not be willing to give him up so easily. The

thought of Cynthia had always intruded more or less effectively between them, but now that this thought

began to fade into the past, the thought of Bessie began to grow out of it with no interposing shadow.

However, Jeff was in no hurry. It was not passion that moved him, and the mood in which he could play with

the notion of getting back to his flirtation with Bessie Lynde was pleasanter after the violence of recent

events than any renewal of strong sensations could be. He preferred to loiter in this mood, and he was

meantime much more comfortable than he had been for a great while. He was rid of the disagreeable sense of

disloyalty to Cynthia, and he was rid of the stress of living up to her conscience in various ways. He was rid

of Bessie Lynde, too, and of the trouble of forecasting and discounting her caprices. His thought turned at

times with a soft regret to hopes, disappointments, experiences connected with neither, and now tinged with a

tender melancholy, unalloyed by shame or remorse. As he drew nearer to Class Day he had a somewhat

keener compunction for Cynthia and the hopes he had encouraged her to build and had then dashed. But he

was coming more and more to regard it all as fatality; and if the chance that he counted upon to bring him and

One of the jays, who was spreading on rather a large scale, wanted Jeff to spread with him, but he refused,

because, as he said, he meant to keep out of it altogether; and for the same reason he declined to take part in

the spread of a rather jay society he belonged to. In his secret heart he trusted that some friendly fortuity

might throw an invitation to Beck Hall in his way, or at least a card for the Gym, which, if no longer the place

it had been, was still by no means jay. He got neither; but as he felt all the joy of the June day in his young

blood he consoled himself very well with the dancing at one of the halls, where the company happened that

year to be openly, almost recklessly jay. Jeff had some distinction among the fellows who enviously knew of

his social success during the winter, and especially of his affair with Bessie Lynde; and there were some girls

very pretty and very well dressed among the crowd of girls who were neither. They were from remote parts

of the country, and in the charge of chaperons ignorant of the differences so poignant to local society. Jeff

went about among them, and danced with the sisters and cousins of several men who seemed superior to the

lost condition of their kinswomen; these were nice fellows enough, but doomed by their grinding, or digging,

or their want of worldly wisdom, to a place among the jays, when they really had some qualifications for a

nobler standing. He had a very good time, and he was enjoying himself in his devotion to a lively young

brunette whom he was making laugh with his jokes about some of the others, when his eye was caught by a

group of ladies who advanced among the jays with something of that collective intrepidity and individual

apprehension characteristic of people in slumming. They had the air of not knowing what might happen to

them, but the adventurous young Boston matron in charge of the girls kept on a bold front behind her

lorgnette, and swept the strange company she found herself in with an unshrinking eye as she led her band

among the promenaders, and past the couples seated along the walls. She hesitated a moment as her glance

fell upon Jeff, and then she yielded, at whatever risk, to the comfort of finding a known face among so many

aliens. "Why, Mr. Durgin!" she called out. "Bessie, here's Mr. Durgin," and she turned to the girl, who was in

her train, as Jeff had perceived by something finer than the senses from the first.

He rose from the side of his brunette, whose brother was standing near, and shook hands with the

adventurous young matron, who seemed suddenly much better acquainted with him than he had ever thought

her, and with Bessie Lynde; the others were New York girls, and the matron presented him. "Are you going

on?" she asked, and the vague challenge with the smile that accompanied it was sufficient invitation for him.

"Why, I believe so," he said, and he turned to take leave of his pretty brunette; but she had promptly vanished

with her brother, and he was spared the trouble of getting rid of her. He would have been equal to much more

for the sake of finding himself with Bessie Lynde again, whose excitement he could see burning in her eyes,

though her thick complexion grew neither brighter nor paler. He did not know what quality of excitement it

might be, but he said, audaciously: "It's a good while since we met!" and he was sensible that his audacity

"Is it?" she asked. He put himself at her side, and he did not leave her again till he went to dress for the

struggle around the Tree. He found himself easily included in the adventurous young matron's party. He had

not the elegance of some of the taller and slenderer men in the scholar's gown, but the cap became his

handsome face. His affair with Bessie Lynde had given him a certain note, and an adventurous young matron,

who was naturally a little indiscriminate, might very well have been willing to let him go about with her

party. She could not know how impudent his mere presence was with reference to Bessie, and the girl herself

made no sign that could have enlightened her. She accepted something more that her share of his general

usefulness to the party; she danced with him whenever he asked her, and she seemed not to scruple to publish

her affair with him in the openest manner. If he could have stilled a certain shame for her which he felt, he

would have thought he was having the best kind of time. They made no account of bygones in their talk, but

she had never been so brilliant, or prompted him to so many of the effronteries which were the spirit of his

humor. He thought her awfully nice, with lots of sense; he liked her letting him come back without any

fooling or fuss, and he began to admire instead of despising her for it. Decidedly it was, as she would have

said, the chicquest sort of thing. What was the use, anyway? He made up his mind.

When he said he must go and dress for the Tree, he took leave of her first, and he was aware of a vivid

emotion, which was like regret in her at parting with him. She said, Must he? She seemed to want to say

something more to him; while he was dismissing himself from the others, he noticed that once or twice she

opened her lips as if she were going to speak. In the end she did nothing more important than to ask if he had

seen her brother; but after he had left the party he turned and saw her following him with eyes that he fancied

The riot round the Tree roared itself through its wonted events. Class after class of the undergraduates filed in

and sank upon the grass below the terraces and parterres of brilliantly dressed ladies within the quadrangle of

seats; the alumni pushed themselves together against the wall of Holder Chapel; the men of the Senior class

came last in their grotesque variety of sweaters and second and third best clothes for the scramble at the Tree.

The regulation cheers tore from throats that grew hoarser and hoarser, till every class and every favorite in the

faculty had been cheered. Then the signalhat was flung into the air, and the rush at the Tree was made, and

Jeff's size and shape forbade him to try for the flowers from the shoulders of others. He was one of a group of

jays who set their backs to the Tree, and fought away all comers except their own; they pulled down every

man not of their sort, and put up a jay, who stripped the Tree of its flowers and flung them to his fellows

below. As he was let drop to the ground, Jeff snatched a handful of his spoil from him, and made off with it

toward the place where he had seen Bessie Lynde and her party. But when he reached the place, shouldering

and elbowing his way through the press, she was no longer there. He saw her hat at a distance through the

crowd, where he did not choose to follow, and he stuffed the flowers into his breast to give to her later. He

expected to meet her somewhere in the evening; if not, he would try to find her at her aunt's house in town;

failing that, he could send her the flowers, and trust her for some sort of leading acknowledgment.

He went and had a bath and dressed himself freshly, and then he went for a walk in the still evening air. He

was very hot from the battle which had been fought over him, and which he had shared with all his strength,

and it seemed to him as if he could not get cool. He strolled far out along Concord Avenue, beyond the

expanses and icehorses of Fresh Pond, into the country toward Belmont, with his hat off and his head down.

He was very well satisfied, and he was smiling to himself at the ease of his return to Bessie, and securely

He heard a vehicle behind him, rapidly driven, and he turned out for it without looking around. Then

suddenly he felt a fiery sting on his forehead, and then a shower of stings swiftly following each other over

his head and face. He remembered stumbling, when he was a boy, into a nest of yellowjackets, that

swarmed up around him and pierced him like sparks of fire at every uncovered point. But he knew at the

same time that it was some one in the vehicle beside him who was lashing him over the head with a whip. He

bowed his head with his eyes shut and lunged blindly out toward his assailant, hoping to seize him.

But the horse sprang aside, and tore past him down the road. Jeff opened his eyes, and through the blood that

dripped from the cuts above them he saw the wicked face of Alan Lynde looking back at him from the

dogcart where he sat with his man beside him. He brandished his broken whip in the air, and flung it into the

bushes. Jeff walked on, and picked it up, before he turned aside to the pools of the marsh stretching on either

hand, and tried to stanch his hurts, and get himself into shape for returning to town and stealing back to his

lodging. He had to wait till after dark, and watch his chance to get into the house unnoticed.

The chum to whom Jeff confided the story of his encounter with a man he left nameless inwardly thanked

fortune that he was not that man; for he knew him destined sooner or later to make such reparation for the

injuries he had inflicted as Jeff chose to exact. He tended him carefully, and respected the reticence Jeff

guarded concerning the whole matter, even with the young doctor whom his friend called, and who kept to

Jeff lay in his darkened room, and burned with them, and with the thoughts, guesses, purposes which flamed

through his mind. Had she, that girl, known what her brother meant to do? Had she wished him to think of

her in the moment of his punishment, and had she spoken of her brother so that he might recall her, or had

she had some ineffective impulse to warn him against her brother when she spoke of him?

He lay and raged in vain with his conjectures, and he did a thousand imagined murders upon Lynde in

Toward the end of the week, while his hurts were still too evident to allow him to go outofdoors before

"Your brother Jackson," Westover wrote, " reached Boston by the New York train this morning, and is with

me here. I must tell you I think he is not at all well, but he does not know how sick he is, and so I forewarn

you. He wants to get on home, but I do not feel easy about letting him make the rest of the journey alone.

Some one ought to go with him. I write not knowing whether you are still in Cambridge or not; or whether, if

you are, you can get away at this time. But I think yon ought, and I wish, at any rate, that you would come in

Jeff wrote back that he had been suffering with a severe attack of erysipelashe decided upon erysipelas for

the time being, but he meant to let Westover know later that he had been in a rowand the doctor would not

let him go out yet. He promised to come in as soon as he possibly could. If Westover thought Jackson ought

to be got home at once, and was not fit to travel alone, he asked him to send a hospital nurse with him.

Westover replied by Jeff's messenger that it would worry and alarm Jackson to be put in charge of a nurse;

but that he would go home with him, and they would start the next day. He urged Jeff to come and see his

brother if it was at all safe for him to do so. But if he could not, Westover would give his mother a reassuring

Mrs. Durgin did not waste any anxiety for the sickness which prevented Jeff from coming home with his

brother. She said ironically that it must be very bad, and she gave all her thought and care to Jackson. The

sick man rallied, as he prophesied he should, in his native air, and celebrated the sense and science of the last

doctor he had seen in Europe, who told him that he had made a great gain, but he had better hurry home as

fast as he could, for he had got all the advantage he could expect to have from his stay abroad, and now home

It could not be known how much of this he believed; he had, at any rate, the pathetic hopefulness of his

malady; but his mother believed it all, and she nursed him with a faith in his recovery which Whitwell

confided to Westover was about as much as he wanted to see, for one while. She seemed to grow younger in

the care of him, and to get back to herself, more and more, from the facts of Jeff's behavior, which had aged

and broken her. She had to tell Jackson about it all, but he took it with that indifference to the things of this

world which the approach of death sometimes brings, and in the light of his passivity it no longer seemed to

her so very bad. It was a relief to have Jackson say, Well, perhaps it was for the best; and it was a comfort to

see how he and Cynthia took to each other; it was almost as if that dreadful trouble had not been. She told

Jackson what hard work she had had to make Cynthia stay with her, and how the girl had consented to stay

only until Jeff came home; but she guessed, now that Jackson had got back, he could make Cynthia see it all

in another light, and perhaps it would all come right again. She consulted him about Jeff's plan of going

abroad, and Jackson said it might be about as well; he should soon be around, and he thought if Jeff went it

would give Cynthia more of a chance to get reconciled. After all, his mother suggested, a good many fellows

behaved worse than Jeff had done and still had made it up with the girls they were engaged to; and Jackson

He did not talk with Cynthia about Jeff, out of that delicacy, or that coldness, common to them both. Perhaps

it was not necessary for them to speak of him; perhaps they understood him aright in their understanding of

Westover stayed on, day after day, thinking somehow that he ought to wait till Jeff came. There were only a

few other people in the hotel, and these were of a quiet sort; they were not saddened by the presence of a

doomed man under the same roof, as gayer summer folks might have been, and they were themselves no

He sat about with them on the veranda, and he made friends among them, and they did what they could to

encourage and console him in his impatience to take up his old cares in the management of the hotel. The

Whitwells easily looked after the welfare of the guests, and Jackson was so much better to every one's

The report may have been so good that Jeff took the affair too easily. It was a fortnight after Jackson's return

to Lion's Head when he began to fail so suddenly and alarmingly that Westover decided upon his own

responsibility to telegraph Jeff of his condition. But he had the satisfaction of Whitwell's approval when he

"Of course, Jackson a'n't long for this world. Anybody but him and his mother could see that; and now he's

just melting away, as you might say. I ha'n't liked his not carin' to work plantchette since he got back; looked

to me from the start that he kind of knowed that it wa'n't worth while for him to trouble about a world that

he'll know all about so soon, anyways; and d' you notice he don't seem to care about Mars, either? I've tried to

wake him up on it twothree times, but you can't git him to take an interest. I guess Jeff can't git here any too

soon on Jackson's account; but as far forth as I go, he couldn't git here too late. I should like to take the top of

Westover had been in Whitwell's confidence since their first chance of speech together. He now said:

"I know it will be rather painful to you to have him here for some reasons, but"

"You mean Cynthy ? Well! I guess when Cynthy can't get along with the sight of Jeff Durgin, she'll be a

different girl from what she's ever been before. If she's got to see that skunk ag'in, I guess this is about the

It was Westover who drove to meet Jeff at the station, when he got his despatch, naming the train he would

They left the station in silence, after their greeting and Jeff's inquiries about Jackson. Jeff had taken the reins,

and now he put them with the whip in one hand, and pushed up his hat with the other, and turned his face full

"I guess that fellow fixed me up pretty well: paints black eyes, and that kind of thing. I got to scrapping with

a man, Class Day; we wanted to settle a little business we began at the Tree, and he left his marks on me. I

meant to tell you the truth as soon as I could get at you; but I had to say erysipelas in my letter. I guess, if you

There could have been no show of affection at his meeting with Jackson even if there had been any fact of it;

that was not the law of their life. But Jeff had always been a turbulent, rebellious, younger brother, resentful

of Jackson's control, too much his junior to have the associations of an equal companionship in the past, and

yet too near him in age to have anything like a filial regard for him. They shook hands, and each asked the

other how he was, and then they seemed to have done with each other. Jeff's mother kissed him in addition to

the handshaking, but made him feel her preoccupation with Jackson; she asked him if he had hurried home on

He shook hands with Cynthia, too, but it was across the barrier which had not been lowered between them

since they parted. He spoke to Jackson about her, the day after he came home, when Jackson said he was

feeling unusually strong and well, and the two brothers had strolled out through the orchard together. Now

and then he gave the sick man his arm, and when he wanted to sit down in a sunny place he spread the shawl

Jackson answered, with lacklustre eyes, "Yes." Presently he asked: "What's become of the other girl?"

"Damn her! I don't know what's become of her, and I don't care!" Jeff exploded, furiously.

"Then you don't care for her any more?" Jackson pursued, with the same languid calm.

Jackson was silent, and the matter seemed to have faded out of his mind. But it was keenly alive in Jeff's

mind, and he was in the strange necessity which men in the flush of life and health often feel of seeking

counsel of those who stand in the presence of death, as if their words should have something of the mystical

"I don't know," Jackson answered, vaguely, and he expressed by his indirection the sense he must sometimes

have had of his impending fate "I don't know what she's going to do, her or mother, either."

"Yes," Jeff assented, "that's what I think of. And I'd do anything that I couldthat you thought was right."

Jackson apparently concentrated his mind upon the question by an effort. "Do you care as much for Cynthy

"Yes," said Jeff, after a moment, "as much as I ever did; and more. But I've been thinking, since the thing

happened, that, if I'd cared for her the way she did for me, it wouldn't have happened. Look here, Jackson!

You know I've never pretended to be like some menlike Mr. Westover, for examplealways looking out

for the right and the wrong, and all that. I didn't make myself, and I guess if the Almighty don't make me go

right it's because He don't want me to. But I have got a conscience about Cynthy, and I'd be willing to help

out a little if I knew how, about her. The devil of it is, I've got to being afraid. I don't mean that I'm not fit for

her; any man's fit for any woman if he wants her bad enough; but I'm afraid I sha'n't ever care for her in the

right way. That's the point. I've cared for just one woman in this world, and it a'n't Cynthy, as far as I can

make out. But she's gone, and I guess I could coax Cynthy round again, and I could be what she wants me to

Jackson lay upon his shawl, looking up at the sky full of islands of warm clouds in its sea of blue; he was

silent so long that Jeff began to think he had not been listening; he could not hear him breathe, and he came

Jackson died a week later, and they buried him in the old family lot in the farthest corner of the orchard. His

mother and Cynthia put on mourning for him, and they stood together by his open grave, Mrs. Durgin leaning

upon her son's arm and the girl upon her father's. The women wept quietly, but Jeff's eyes were dry, though

his face was discharged of all its prepotent impudence. Westover, standing across the grave from him, noticed

the marks on his forehead that he said were from his scrapping, and wondered what really made them. He

recognized the spot where they were standing as that where the boy had obeyed the law of his nature and

revenged the stress put upon him for righteousness. Over the stone of the nearest grave Jeff had shown a face

of triumphant derision when he pelted Westover with apples. The painter's mind fell into a chaos of

conjecture and misgiving, so that he scarcely took in the words of the composite service which the minister

Some of the guests from the hotel came to the funeral, but others who were not in good health remained

away, and there was a general sense among them, which imparted itself to Westover, that Jackson's dying so,

at the beginning of the season, was not a fortunate incident. As he sat talking with Jeff at a corner of the

piazza late in the afternoon, Frank Whitwell came up to them and said there were some people in the office

who had driven over from another hotel to see about board, but they had heard there was sickness in the

"They're not satisfied with what I've said," the boy urged. "What shall I tell them?"

"Tell them togo to the devil," said Jeff, and when Frank Whitwell made off with this message for delivery in

such decent terms as he could imagine for it, Jeff said, rather to himself than to Westover, "I don't see how

we're going to run this hotel with that old family lot down there in the orchard much longer."

He assumed the air of full authority at Lion's Head; and Westover felt the stress of a painful conjecture in

regard to the Whitwells intensified upon him from the moment he turned away from Jackson's grave.

Cynthia and her father had gone back to their own house as soon as Jeff returned, and though the girl came

home with Mrs. Durgin after the funeral, and helped her in their common duties through the afternoon and

evening, Westover saw her taking her way down the hill with her brother when the long day's work was over.

Jeff saw her too; he was sitting with Westover at the office door smoking, and he was talking of the

"I suppose they won't stay," he said, "and I can't expect it; but I don't know what mother will do, exactly."

At the same moment Whitwell came round the corner of the hotel from the barn, and approached them: "Jeff,

"All right, Mr. Whitwell, "said Jeff, with respectful gravity; "I was afraid of it."

Westover made a motion to rise, but Whitwell laid a detaining hand upon his knee. "There ain't anything so

"We a'n't agoin' to leave you in the lurch, and we want you should take your time, especially Mis' Durgin.

"Yes, I understand that, Mr. Whitwell; I guess mother will miss you, but if you must go, you must." The two

men remained silent a moment, and then Jeff broke out passionately, rising and flinging his cigar away: "I

wish I could go, instead! That would be the right way, and I guess mother would like it full as well. Do you

see any way to manage it? "He put his foot up in his chair, and dropped his elbow on his knee, with his chin

propped in his hand. Westover could see that he meant what he was saying. "If there was any way, I'd do it. I

know what you think of me, and I should be just like you, in your place. I don't feel right to turn you out here,

I don't, Mr. Whitwell, and yet if I stay, I've got to do it. What's the reason I can't go?"

"You can't," said Whitwell, "and that's all about it. We shouldn't let you, if you could. But I a'n't surprised

you feel the way you do," he added, unsparingly. "As you say, I should feel just so myself if I was in your

Whitwell turned and slouched down the hill, leaving the painter to the most painful moment he had known

with Jeff Durgin, and nearer sympathy. "That's all right, Mr. Westover," Jeff said, "I don't blame him."

He remained in a constraint from which he presently broke with mocking hilarity when Jombateeste came

round the corner of the house, as if he had been waiting for Whitwell to be gone, and told Jeff he must get

"Why don't you wait and take the horses with you, Jombateeste?" he inquired. "They'll be handing in their

The little Canuck paused, as if uncertain whether he was made the object of unfriendly derision or not, and

looked at Westover for help. Apparently he decided to chance it in as bitter an answer as he could invent.

"The 'oss can't 'elp 'imself, Mr. Durgin. 'E stay. But you don' hown EVERYBODY."

"That's so, Jombateeste," said Jeff. "That's a good hit. It makes me feel awfully. Have a cigar?" The Canuck

declined with a dignified bow, and Jeff said: "You don't smoke any more? Oh, I see! It's my tobacco you're

down on. What's the matter, Jombateeste ? What are you going away for?" Jeff lighted for himself the cigar

"All right. And if I can get him to stay will you stay too, Jombateeste? I don't like to see a rat leaving a ship;

the ship's sure to sink, if he does. How do you suppose I'm going to run Lion's Head without you to throw

down hay to the horses? It will be ruin to me, sure, Jombateeste. All the guests know how you play on the

pitchfork out there, and they'll leave in a body if they hear you've quit. Do say you'll stay, and I'll reduce your

Jombateeste waited to hear no more injuries. He said: "You'll don' got money enough, Mr. Durgin, by gosh!

to reduce my wages," and he started down the hill toward Whitwell's house with as great loftiness as could

"Well, I seem to be getting it all round, Mr. Westover," said Jeff. "This must make you feel good. I don't

He walked away without saying goodnight, and Westover went to bed without the chance of setting himself

right. In the morning, when he came down to breakfast, and stopped at the desk to engage a conveyance for

the station from Frank Whitwell the boy forestalled him with a grave face. "You don't know about Mrs.

"Well, we can't tell exactly. Father thinks it's a shock; Jombateeste gone over to Lovewell for the doctor.

He spoke softly, that no one else might hear; but by noon the fact that Mrs. Durgin had been stricken with

paralysis was all over the place. The gloom cast upon the opening season by Jackson's death was deepened

among the guests. Some who had talked of staying through July went away that day. But under Cynthia's

management the housekeeping was really unaffected by Mrs. Durgin's calamity, and the people who stayed

found themselves as comfortable as ever. Jeff came fully into the hotel management, and in their business

relation Cynthia and he were continually together; there was no longer a question of the Whitwells leaving

him; even Jombateeste persuaded himself to stay, and Westover felt obliged to remain at least till the present

With the first return of physical strength, Mrs. Durgin was impatient to be seen about the house, and to

retrieve the season that her affliction had made so largely a loss. The people who had become accustomed to

it stayed on, and the house filled up as she grew better, but even the sight of her in a wheeled chair did not

bring back the prosperity of other years. She lamented over it with a keen and full perception of the fact, but

One day, after Mrs. Durgin had declared that she did not know what they were to do, if things kept on as they

"I don't know," said the girl, with a troubled voice, "and I don't know what to do about it. It don't seem as if I

"Why didn't he tell her?" demanded her father. "'Ta'n't fair his leavin' it to you. But it's like him."

The sick woman's hold upon the fact weakened most when she was tired. When she was better, she knew

how it was with them. Commonly it was when Cynthia had got her to bed for the night that she sent for Jeff,

and wished to ask him what he was going to do. "You can't expect Cynthy to stay here another winter helpin'

you, with Jackson away. You've got to either take her with you, or else come here yourself. Give up your last

year in college, why don't you? I don't want you should stay, and I don't know who does. If I was in Cynthia's

place, I'd let you work off your own conditions, now you've give up the law. She'll kill herself, tryin' to keep

Sometimes her speech became so indistinct that no one but Cynthia could make it out; and Jeff, listening with

a face as nearly discharged as might be of its laughing irony, had to turn to Cynthia for the word which no

one else could catch, and which the stricken woman remained distressfully waiting for her to repeat to him,

with her anxious eyes upon the girl's face. He was dutifully patient with all his mother's whims. He came

whenever she sent for him, and sat quiet under the severities with which she visited all his past unworthiness.

"Who you been hectorin' now, I should like to know," she began on him one evening when he came at her

"Fox is all right, mother," Jeff responded. "You're feeling a little better tonight, a'n't you?"

"I don't know; I can't tell," she returned, with a gleam of intelligence in her eye. Then she said: " I don't see

"OhCynthy!" said Mrs. Durgin, with a glance as of surprise at seeing her. "No, Cynthy's all right. But

where's Jackson and your father? If I've told them not to be out in the dew once, I've told 'em a hundred

times. Cynthy'd better look after her housekeepin' if she don't want the whole place to run behind, and not a

soul left in the house. What time o' year is it now?" she suddenly asked, after a little weary pause.

"Oh," she sighed, "I thought it was the beginnin' of May. Didn't you come up here in May?"

"Well, then Or, mebbe that's one o' them tormentin' dreams; they do pester so! What did you come for?"

Jeff was sitting on one side of her bed and Cynthia on the other: She was looking at the sufferer's face, and

she did not meet the glance of amusement which Jeff turned upon her at being so fairly cornered. "Well, I

"You'd better tell her," said the girl, coldly, to Jeff. "She won't be satisfied till you do. She'll keep coming

"Well, mother," said Jeff, still with something of his hardy amusement, "I hadn't been acting just right, and I

"You better let the child alone. If I ever catch you teasin' them children again, I'll make Jackson shoot Fox."

She moved herself restively in bed. "What's this," she demanded of her son, "that Whitwell's tellin' about you

"Well, there was talk of that," said Jeff, passing his hand over his lips to keep back the smile that was stealing

Cynthia kept her eyes on Jeff, who dropped his to his mother's face. "Cynthy did it; but I guess I gave her

"About that hussy in Boston? She was full more to blame than what you was. I don't see what Cynthy wanted

Mrs. Durgin's speech had been thickening more and more. She now said something that Jeff could not

Jeff kept his eyes on hers, but he answered to his mother: "Not any more than I deserved. I hadn't any right to

Again the sick woman tried to say something. Jeff made out a few syllables, and, after his mother had

Jeff hesitated, and then said: "Well, not yet, mother," and he bent an entreating look upon Cynthia which she

could not feel was wholly for himself. "II guess we can fix it, somehow. I behaved very badly to Cynthia."

"Not to that little scalawag, then!" cried Jeff. "If the wrong wasn't to you, there wasn't any wrong."

"Oh, I guess I can stand it," said Jeff, and his smile now came to his lips and eyes.

His mother had followed their quick parley with eager looks, as if she were trying to keep her intelligence to

its work concerning them. The effort seemed to exhaust her, and when she spoke again her words were so

indistinct that even Cynthia could not understand them till she had repeated them several times.

Then the girl was silent, while the invalid kept an eager look upon her. She seemed to understand that

"Do you want me to know what she said?" asked Jeff, respectfully, reverently almost.

Cynthia said, gently: "She says that then you must show you didn't mean any harm to me, and that you cared

"Thank you," said Jeff, and he turned to his mother. "I'll do everything I can to make Cynthy believe that,

The girl broke into tears and went out of the room. She sent in the nightwatcher, and then Jeff took leave of

Into the shadow of a starlit night he saw the figure he had been waiting for glide out of the glitter of the hotel

"Cynthia!" he called; and when he came up with her he asked: "What's the reason we can't make it true? Why

Cynthia stopped, as her wont was when she wished to speak seriously. "Do you ask that for my sake or hers?"

"I thought so. You ought to have asked it for your own sake, Jeff, and then I might have been fool enough to

She started swiftly down the hill again, and this time he did not try to follow her.

Mrs. Durgin's speech never regained the measure of clearness it had before; no one but Cynthia could

understand her, and often she could not. The doctor from Lovewell surmised that she had sustained another

stroke, lighter, more obscure than the first, and it was that which had rendered her almost inarticulate. The

paralysis might have also affected her brain, and silenced her thoughts as well as her words. Either she

believed that the reconciliation between Jeff and Cynthia had taken place, or else she could no longer care.

She did not question them again, but peacefully weakened more and more. Near the end of September she

The day after the funeral Jeff had a talk with Whitwell, and opened his mind to him.

"I'm going over to the other side, and I shan't be back before spring, or about time to start the season here.

What I want to know is whether, if I'm out of the house, and not likely to come back, you'll stay here and look

after the place through the winter. It hasn't been a good season, but I guess I can afford to make it worth your

Whitwell leaned forward and took a straw into his mouth from the golden wall of oat sheaves in the barn

where they were talking. A soft rustling in the mow overhead marked the remote presence of Jombateeste,

who was getting forward the hay for the horses, pushing it toward the holes where it should fall into their

"I should want to think about it," said Whitwell. "I do' know as Cynthy'd care much about stayin'or Frank."

"How long do you want to think about it?" Jeff demanded, ignoring the possible wishes of Cynthia and

"I don't know as I should want to stay without I could have somebody I could depend on, with me, to look

Whitwell called to the Canuck, and he came forward to the edge of the mow, and stood, fork in hand, looking

"Want to stay here this winter and look after the horses, Jombateeste?" Whitwell asked.

"I mean, along with me," Whitwell explained. "If I conclude to stay, will you? Jeff's goin' abroad."

"Not for you, Jeff Dorrgin," returned the Canuck. "I strain myself till I bust, if I want."

Jeff sneered to Whitwell: "Well, then, the most important point is settled. Let me know about the minor

Whitwell talked the matter over with his children at supper that evening. Jeff had made him a good offer, and

Frank looked to his sister for their common decision. "I am going to try for a school," she said, quietly. "It's

"And you don't feel as if it was kind of meechin', our takin' up with his offer, after what's" Whitwell

"You are doing the favor, father," said the girl. "He knows that, and I guess he wouldn't know where to look

if you refused. And, after all, what's happened now is as much my doing as his."

"I guess that's something so," said Whitwell, with a long sigh of relief. "Well, I'm glad you can look at it in

that light, Cynthy. It's the way the feller's built, I presume, as much as anything."

His daughter waived the point. "I shouldn't feel just right if none of us stayed in the old place. I should feel as

Her eyes shone, and her father said: "Well, I guess that's so, come to think of it. She's been like a mother to

you, this past year, ha'n't she? And it must have come pootty hard for her, sidin' ag'in' Jeff. But she done it."

The girl turned her head away. They were sitting in the little, low keepingroom of Whitwell's house, and her

father had his hat on provisionally. Through the window they could see the light of the lantern at the office

door of the hotel, whose mass was lost in the dark above and behind the lamp. It was all very still outside.

Cynthia started, but it was to ask: "Do you want I should help you with your Latin, Frank?"

Whitwell came back an hour later and found them still at their books. He told them it was all arranged;

Durgin was to give up the place to him in a week, and he was to surrender it again when Jeff came back in the

spring. In the mean time things were to remain as they were; after he was gone, they could all go and live at

"We'll see," said Cynthia. "I've been thinking that might be the best way, after all. I might not get a school,

"That's so," her father assented. "I declare," he added, after a moment's muse, "I felt sorry for the feller settin'

up there alone, with nobody to do for him but that old thing he's got in. She can't cook any more than" He

"Well, you no need to," said her father. He got down the planchette, and labored with it, while his children

"Dumn 'f I can make the thing work," he said to himself at last. "I can't git any of 'em up. If Jackson was here,

Thrice a day Cynthia went up to the hotel and oversaw the preparation of Jeff's meals and kept taut the slack

housekeeping of the old Irish woman who had remained as a favor, after the hotel closed, and professed to

have lost the chance of a place for the winter by her complaisance. She submitted to Cynthia's authority, and

tried to make interest for an indefinite stay by sudden zeal and industry, and the last days of Jeff in the hotel

were more comfortable than he openly recognized. He left the care of the building wholly to Whitwell, and

shut himself up in the old farm parlor with the plans for a new hotel which he said he meant to put up some

day, if he could ever get rid of the old one. He went once to Lovewell, where he renewed the insurance, and

somewhat increased it; and he put a small mortgage on the property. He forestalled the slow progress of the

knowledge of others' affairs, which, in the country, is as sure as it is slow, and told Whitwell what he had

done. He said he wanted the mortgage money for his journey, and the insurance money, if he could have the

Cynthia seldom met him in her comings and goings, but if they met they spoke on the terms of their boy and

girl associations, and with no approach through resentment or tenderness to the relation that was ended

between them. She saw him oftener than at any other time setting off on the long tramps he took through the

woods in the afternoons. He was always alone, and, so far as any one knew, his wanderings had no object but

to kill the time which hung heavy on his hands during the fortnight after his mother's death, before he sailed.

It might have seemed strange that he should prefer to pass the days at Lion's Head after he had arranged for

the care of the place with Whitwell, and Whitwell always believed that he stayed in the hope of somehow

One day, toward the very last, Durgin found himself pretty well fagged in the old pulpmill clearing on the

side of Lion's Head, which still belonged to Whitwell, and he sat down on a mouldering log there to rest. It

had always been a favorite picnic ground, but the season just past had known few picnics, and it was those of

former years that had left their traces in rusty sardinecans and broken glass and crockery on the border of

the clearing, which was now almost covered with white moss. Jeff thought of the day when he lurked in the

hollow below with Fox, while Westover remained talking with Whitwell. He thought of the picnic that Mrs.

Marven had embittered for him, and he thought of the last time that he had been there with Westover, when

Life had, so far, not been what he meant it, and just now it occurred to him that he might not have wholly

made it what it had been. It seemed to him that a good many other people had come in and taken a hand in

making his own life what it had been; and if he had meddled with theirs more than he was wanted, it was

about an even thing. As far as he could make out, he was a sort of ingredient in the general mixture. He had

probably done his share of the flavoring, but he had had very little to do with the mixing. There were

different ways of looking at the thing. Westover had his way, but it struck Jeff that it put too much

responsibility on the ingredient, and too little on the power that chose it. He believed that he could prove a

clear case in his own favor, as far as the question of final justice was concerned, but he had no complaints to

make. Things had fallen out very much to his mind. He was the Landlord at Lion's Head, at last, with the full

right to do what he pleased with the place, and with half a year's leisure before him to think it over. He did

not mean to waste the time while he was abroad; if there was anything to be learned anywhere about keeping

a summer hotel, he was going to learn it; and he thought the summer hotel could be advantageously studied in

its winter phases in the mild climates of Southern Europe. He meant to strike for the class of Americans who

resorted to those climates; to divine their characters and to please their tastes.

He unconsciously included Cynthia in his scheme of inquiry; he had been used so long to trust to her instincts

and opinions, and to rely upon her help, and he realized that she was no longer in his life with something like

the shock a man experiences when the loss of a limb, which continues a part of his inveterate consciousness,

is brought to his sense by some mechanical attempt to use it. But even in this pang he did not regret that all

was over between them. He knew now that he had never cared for her as he had once thought, and on her

account, if not his own, he was glad their engagement was broken. A soft melancholy for his own

disappointment imparted itself to his thoughts of Cynthia. He felt truly sorry for her, and he truly admired and

respected her. He was in a very lenient mood toward every one, and he went so far in thought toward

forgiving his enemies that he was willing at least to pardon all those whom he had injured. A little rustling in

the underbrush across the clearing caught his quick ear, and he looked up to see Jombateeste parting the

boughs of the young pines on its edge and advancing into the open with a gun on his shoulder. He called to

Jeff could not resist the desire to scoff which always came upon him at sight of the Canuck. "Oh, pshaw!

Why don't you go for woodchucks? They fly low, and you can hit them on the wing, if you can't sneak on 'em

Jombateeste received his raillery in dignified silence, and turned back into the woods again. He left Durgin in

heightened goodhumor with himself and with the world, which had finally so well adapted itself to his

Jeff watched his resentful going with a grin, and then threw himself back on the thick bed of dry moss where

he had been sitting, and watched the clouds drifting across the space of blue which the clearing opened

overhead. His own action reminded him of Jackson, lying in the orchard and looking up at the sky. He felt

strangely at one with him, and he experienced a tenderness for his memory which he had not known before.

Jackson had been a good man; he realized that with a curious sense of novelty in the reflection; he wondered

what the incentives and the objects of such men as Jackson and Westover were, anyway. Something like grief

for his brother came upon him; not such grief as he had felt, passionately enough, though tacitly, for his

mother, but a regret for not having shown Jackson during his life that he could appreciate his unselfishness,

though he could not see the reason or the meaning of it. He said to himself, in their safe remoteness from each

other, that he wished he could do something for Jackson. He wondered if in the course of time he should get

He heard sounds again in the edge of the clearing, but he decided that it was that fool Jombateeste coming

back; and when steps approached softly and hesitantly across the moss, he did not trouble himself to take his

A voice that was not Jombateeste's spoke: "I say! Can you tell me the way to the Brooker Institute, or to the

Jeff sat suddenly boltupright; in another moment he jumped to his feet. The Brooker Institute was a branch

of the Keeley Cure recently established near the Huddle, and this must be a patient who had wandered from

it, on one of the excursions the inmates made with their guardians, and lost his way. This was the fact that

Jeff realized at the first glance he gave the man. The next he recognized that the man was Alan Lynde.

"Oh, it's you," he said, quite simply. He felt so cruelly the hardship of his one unforgiven enemy's coming

upon him just when he had resolved to be good that the tears came into his eyes. Then his rage seemed to

swell up in him like the rise of a volcanic flood. "I'm going to kill you!" he, roared, and he launched himself

But the murder which Jeff meant was not to be so easily done. Lynde had not grown up in dissolute idleness

without acquiring some of the arts of selfdefence which are called manly. He met Jeff's onset with

remembered skill and with the strength which he had gained in three months of the wholesome regimen of

the Brooker Institute. He had been sent there, not by Dr. Lacy's judgment, but by his despair, and so far the

Cure had cured. He felt strong and fresh, and the hate which filled Jeff at sight of him steeled his shaken

He made a desperate fight where he could not hope for mercy, and kept himself free of his powerful foe,

whom he fought round and foiled, if he could not hurt him. Jeff never knew of the blows Lynde got in upon

him; he had his own science, too, but he would not employ it. He wanted to crash through Lynde's defence

The contest could not have lasted long at the best; but before Lynde was worn out he caught his heel in an old

laurel root, and while he whirled to recover his footing Jeff closed in upon him, caught him by the middle,

flung him down upon the moss, and was kneeling on his breast with both hands at his throat.

He glared down into his enemy's face, and suddenly it looked pitifully little and weak, like a girl's face, a

Sometimes, afterward, it seemed to him that he forbore because at that instant he saw Jombateeste appear at

the edge of the clearing and come running upon them. At other times he had the fancy that his action was

purely voluntary, and that, against the logic of his hate and habit of his life, he had mercy upon his enemy. He

did not pride himself upon it; he rather humbled himself before the fact, which was accomplished through his

He took his hands from Lynde's throat and his knees off his breast. "Get up," he said; and when Lynde stood

trembling on his feet he said to Jombateeste : "Show this man the way to the Brooker Institute. I'll take your

gun home for you," and it was easy for him to detach the piece from the bewildered Canuck's grasp. "Go!

The day after Thanksgiving, when Westover was trying to feel well after the turkey and cranberry and cider

which a lady had given him at a consciously oldfashioned Thanksgiving dinner, but not making it out

sufficiently to be able to work, he was astonished to receive a visit from Whitwell.

"Well, sir," said the philosopher, without giving himself pause for the exchange of reflections upon his

presence in Boston, which might have been agreeable to him on a less momentous occasion. "It's all up with

"What do you mean?" demanded Westover, with his mind upon the mountain, which he electrically figured

"She's burnt. Burnt down the day before yist'd'y aft'noon. A'n't hardly a stick of her left. Ketehed Lord knows

how, from the kitchen chimney, and a high northwest wind blowin', that ca'd the sparks to the barn, and set

fire to that, too. Hasses gone; couldn't get round to 'em; only three of us there, and mixed up so about the

house till it was so late the critters wouldn't come out. Folks from over Huddle way see the blaze, and helped

ail they could; but it wa'n't no use. I guess all we saved, about, was the flagpole."

"Well, there was our misfortune," said Whitwell, while Westover's heart stopped in a mere wantonness of

apprehension. "If she'd be'n there, it might ha' be'n diff'ent. We might ha' had more sense; or she would,

anyway. But she was over to Lovewell stockin' up for Thanksgivin', and I had to make out the best I could,

with Frank and Jombateeste. Why, that Canuck didn't seem to have no more head on him than a hen. I was

disgusted; but Cynthy wouldn't let me say anything to him, and I d' know as 't 'ould done any good, myself.

We've talked it all over in every light, ever since; guess we've set up most the time talkin', and nothin' would

do her but I should come down and see you before I took a single step about it."

"Howstep about what?" asked Westover, with a remote sense of hardship at being brought in, tempered by

"Why, that devil," said Whitwell, and Westover knew that he meant Jeff, "went and piled on all the insurance

"I should think the best thing was to collect the insurance," Westover suggested, distractedly.

"It a'n't so easy as what that comes to," said Whitwell. "I couldn't collect the insurance; and here's the point,

anyway. When a hotel's made a bad season, and she's fully insured, she's pootty certain to burn up some time

in the winter. Everybody knows that comical devil wanted lion's Head to burn up so 't he could build new,

and I presume there a'n't a man, woman, or child anywhere round but what believes I set her on fire. Hired to

do it. Now, see? Jeff off in Europe; daytime; no lives lost; prop'ty total loss. 's a clear case. Heigh? I tell you,

Westover tried to protest, to say something in derision or defiance; but he was shaken himself, and he ended

by getting his hat and coat; Whitwell had kept his own on, in the excitement. "We'll go out and see a lawyer.

A friend of mine; it won't cost you anything." He added this assurance at a certain look of reluctance that

came into Whitwell's face, and that left it as soon as he had spoken. Whitwell glanced round the studio even

cheerily. "Who'd ha' thought," he said, fastening upon the study which Westover had made of Lion's head the

winter before, "that the old place would 'a' gone so soon?" He did not mean the mountain which he was

looking at, but the hotel that was present to his mind's eye; and Westover perceived as he had not before that

He remembered to ask now where Whitwell had left his family, and Whitwell said that Frank and Cynthia

were at home in his own house with Jombateeste; but he presumed he could not get back to them now before

the next day. He refused to be interested in any of the aspects of Boston which Westover casually pointed out,

but when they had seen the lawyer he came forth a new man, vividly interested in everything. The lawyer had

been able to tell them that though the insurance companies would look sharply into the cause of the fire, there

was no probability, hardly a possibility, that they would inculpate him, and he need give himself no anxiety

"There's one thing, though," Whitwell said to Westover when they got out upon the street. "Hadn't I ought to

Whitwell had it, and he tasted all the dramatic quality of sending word to Jeff, which he would receive in

Florence an hour after it left Boston. "I did hope I could ha' cabled once to Jackson while he was gone," he

said, regretfully, "but, unless we can fix up a wire with the other world, I guess I shan't ever do it now. I

He had a sectarian pride in the beauty of the Spiritual Temple which Westover walked him by on his way to

see Trinity Church and the Fine Arts Museum, and he sorrowed that he could not attend a service' there. But

he was consoled by the lunch which he had with Westover at a restaurant where it was served in courses. "I

presume this is what Jeff's goin' to give 'em at Lion's Head when he gits it goin' again."

"How is it he's in Florence?" it occurred to Westover to ask. "I thought he was going to Nice for the winter."

"I don't know. That's the address he give in his last letter," said Whitwell. "I'll be glad when I've done with

It was in Westover's mind to say that he wished the Whitwells had never had anything to do with Durgin after

his mother's death. He had felt it a want of delicacy in them that they had been willing to stay on in his

employ, and his ideal of Cynthia had suffered a kind of wound from what must have been her decision in the

matter. He would have expected something altogether different from her pride, her selfrespect. But he now

His words seemed to appeal to Whitwell's impartiality. "Well, I d' know as I should say bad, exactly. He's a

"Well, I guess you're partly right there," Whitwell admitted, with a laugh. After a dreamy moment he asked:

Westover knew that he meant Bessie Lynde. "She's abroad somewhere, with her aunt."

Whitwell had not taken any wine; apparently he was afraid of forming instantly the habit of drink if he

touched it; but he tolerated Westover's pint of Zinfandel, and he seemed to warm sympathetically to a greater

confidence as the painter made away with it. "There's one thing I never told Cynthy yet; well, Jombateeste

didn't tell me himself till after Jeff was gone; and then, thinks I, what's the use? But I guess you had better

He leaned forward across the table, and gave Jombateeste's story of the encounter between Jeff and Alan

Lynde in the clearing. "Now what do you suppose was the reason Jeff let up on the feller? Of course, he

meant to choke the life out of him, and his just ketchin' sight of Jombateestedo you believe that was

enough to stop him, when he'd started in for a thing like that? Or what was it done it?"

Westover listened with less thought of the fact itself than of another fact that it threw light upon. It was clear

to him now that the Class Day scrapping which had left its marks upon Jeff's face was with Lynde, and that

when Jeff got him in his power he was in such a fury for revenge that no mere motive of prudence could have

arrested him. In both events, it must have been Bessie Lynde that was the moving cause; but what was it that

Whitwell nodded. "That's what Jombateeste said. Said Jeff said if he let the feller look back he'd shoot him.

"It's been too much for me," Whitwell said. "I told Jombateeste he'd better keep it to himself, and I guess he

Whitwell threw his head back in a sudden laugh that showed all the work of his dentist. "Well, wouldn't it be

"It would be like Jeff; I don't know whether it would be a joke or not. I hope he won't find it a joke, if it's so,"

said Westover, gloomily. A fantastic apprehension seized him, which made him wish for the moment that it

might be so, and which then passed, leaving him simply sorry for any chance that might bring Bessie Lynde

For the evening Whitwell's preference would have been a lecture of some sort, but there was none advertised,

and he consented to go with Westover to the theatre. He came back to the painter at dinnertime, after a wary

exploration of the city, which had resulted not only in a personal acquaintance with its monuments, but an

immunity from its dangers and temptations which he prided himself hardly less upon. He had seen Faneuil

Hall, the old State House, Bunker Hill, the Public Library, and the Old South Church, and he had not been

sandbagged or buncoed or led astray from the paths of propriety. In the comfortable sense of escape, he was

disposed, to moralize upon the civilization of great cities, which he now witnessed at first hand for the first

time; and throughout the evening, between the acts of the "Old Homestead," which he found a play of some

merit, but of not so much novelty in its characters as he had somehow led himself to expect, he recurred to

the difficulties and dangers that must beset a young man in coming to a place like Boston. Westover found

him less amusing than he had on his own ground at Lion's Head, and tasted a quality of commonplace in his

deliverances which made him question whether he had not, perhaps, always owed more to this environment

than he had suspected. But they parted upon terms of mutual respect and in the common hope of meeting

again. Whitwell promised to let Westover know what he heard of Jeff, but, when the painter had walked the

philosopher home to his hotel, he found a message awaiting him at his studio from Jeff direct:

Westover raged at the intelligent thrift of this telegram, and at the implication that he not only knew all about

the business of Whitwell's despatch, but that he was in communication with him, and would be sufficiently

interested to convey Jeff's message to him. Of course, Durgin had at once divined that Whitwell must have

come to him for advice, and that he would hear from him, whether he was still in Boston or not. By cabling to

Westover, Jeff saved the cost of an elaborate address to Whitwell at Lion's Head, and had brought the painter

in for further consultation and assistance in his affairs. What vexed him still more was his own consciousness

that he could not defeat this impudent expectation. He had, indeed, some difficulty with himself to keep from

going to Whitwell's hotel with the despatch at once, and he slept badly, in his fear that he might not get it to

The sum of Jeff's letter when it came, and it came to Westover and not to Whitwell, was to request the painter

to see a lawyer in his behalf, and put his insurance policies in his hands, with full authority to guard his

interests in the matter. He told Westover where his policies would be found, and enclosed the key of his box

in the Safety Vaults, with a due demand for Westover's admission to it. He registered his letter, and he

jocosely promised Westover to do as much for him some day, in pleading that there was really no one else he

could turn to. He put the whole business upon him, and Westover discharged himself of it as briefly as he

could by delivering the papers to the lawyer he had already consulted for Whitwell.

Before he parted with the lawyer he had his misgivings, and he said: "I shouldn't want the blackguard to think

The lawyer laughed intelligently. "I shall only make the usual charge. Then he is a blackguard."

Westover once more promised himself to have nothing to do with Jeff Durgin or his affairs. But he did not

promise this so confidently as upon former occasions, and he instinctively waited for a new complication. He

could not understand why Jeff should not have come home to look after his insurance, unless it was because

he had become interested in some woman even beyond his concern for his own advantage. He believed him

capable of throwing away advantages for disadvantages in a thing of that kind, but he thought it more

probable that he had fallen in love with one whom he would lose nothing by winning. It did not seem at all

impossible that he should have again met Bessie Lynde, and that they should have made up their quarrel, or

whatever it was. Jeff would consider that he had done his whole duty by Cynthia, and that he was free to

renew his suit with Bessie; and there was nothing in Bessie's character, as Westover understood it, to prevent

her taking him back upon a very small show of repentance if the needed emotions were in prospect. He had

decided pretty finally that it would be Bessie rather than another when he received a letter from Mrs.

Vostrand. It was dated at Florence, and after some pretty palaver about their old friendship, which she only

Westover did not know whether to laugh or cry when he read this letter, which covered several sheets of

paper in lines that traversed each other in different directions. His old, youthful ideal of Mrs. Vostrand finally

perished in its presence, though still he could not blame her for wishing to see her daughter well married after

having seen her married so ill. He asked himself, without getting any very definite response, whether Mrs.

Vostrand had always been this kind of a woman, or had grown into it by the use of arts which her peculiar

plan of life had rendered necessary to her. He remembered the intelligent toleration of Cynthia in speaking of

her, and his indignation in behalf of the girl was also thrill of joy for her escape from the fate which Mrs.

Vostrand was so eagerly invoking for her daughter. But he thought of Genevieve with something of the same

tenderness, and with a compassion that was for her alone. She seemed to him a victim who was to be

sacrificed a second time, and he had clearly a duty to her which he must not evade. The only question could

be how best to discharge it, and Westover took some hours from his work to turn the question over in his

mind. In the end, when he was about to give the whole affair up for the present, and lose a night's sleep over

it later, he had an inspiration, and he acted upon it at once. He perceived that he owed no formal response to

the sentimental insincerities of Mrs. Vostrand's letter, and he decided to write to Durgin himself, and to put

the case altogether in his hands. If Durgin chose to show the Vostrands what he should write, very well; if he

chose not to show it, then Westover's apparent silence would be a sufficient reply to Mrs. Vostrand's appeal.

As soon as Westover had posted his letter he began to blame himself for it. He saw that the right and manly

thing would have been to write to Mrs. Vostrand, and tell her frankly what he thought of Durgin. Her folly,

her insincerity, her vulgarity, had nothing to do with the affair, so far as he was concerned. If she had once

been so kind to him as to bind him to her in grateful friendship, she certainly had a claim upon his best

offices. His duty was to her, and not at all to Durgin. He need not have said anything against him because it

was against him, but because it was true; and if he had written he must not have said anything less than the

He could have chosen not to write at all. He could have said that her mawkish hypocrisy was a little too

much; that she was really wanting him to whitewash Durgin for her, and she had no right to put upon him the

responsibility for the step she clearly wished to take. He could have made either of these decisions, and

defended them to himself; but in what he had done he had altogether shirked. While he was writing to

Durgin, and pretending that he could justly leave this affair to him, he was simply indulging a bit of

sentimental pose, far worse than anything in Mrs. Vostrand's sham appeal for his help.

He felt, as the time went by, that she had not written of her own impulse, but at her daughter's urgence, and

that it was this poor creature whose trust he had paltered with. He believed that Durgin would not fail to make

her unhappy, yet he had not done what he might to deliver her out of his hand. He had satisfied a wretched

pseudo magnanimity toward a faithless scoundrel, as he thought Durgin, at the cost of a woman whose

At first he thought his action irrevocable, and he bitterly upbraided himself for not taking council with

Cynthia upon Mrs. Vostrand's letter. He had thought of doing that, and then he had dismissed the thought as

involving pain that he had no right to inflict; but now he perceived that the pain was such as she must suffer

in the event, and that he had stupidly refused himself the only means of finding out the right thing to do. Her

true heart and her clear mind would have been infallible in the affair, and he had trusted to his own muddled

He began to write other letters: to Durgin, to Mrs. Vostrand, to Genevieve; but none of them satisfied him,

and he let the days go by without doing anything to retrieve his error or fulfil his duty. At last he did what he

ought to have done at first: he enclosed Mrs. Vostrand's letter to Cynthia, and asked her what she thought he

ought to have done. While he was waiting Cynthia's answer to his letter, a cable message reached him from

Since the matter was now irremediable, Westover crept less miserably through the days than he could have

believed he should, until the letter which Mrs. Vostrand's cable promised came to hand.

From time to time during the winter Westover wrote to Cynthia, and had letters from her in which he pleased

himself fancying almost a personal effect of that shyness which he thought a charming thing in her. But no

doubt this was something he read into them; on their face they were plain, straightforward accounts of the life

she led in the little old house at Lion's Head, under the shadow of the black ruin on the hill. Westover had

taken to sending her books and magazines, and in thanking him for these she would sometimes speak of

things she had read in them. Her criticism related to the spirit rather than the manner of the things she spoke

of, and it pleased him that she seemed, with all her insight, to have very little artistic sense of any kind; in the

world where he lived there were so many women with an artistic sense in every kind that he was rather weary

There never was anything about Durgin in the letters, and Westover was both troubled and consoled by this

silence. It might be from consciousness, and it probably was; it might be from indifference. In the worst

event, it hid any pain she might have felt with a dignity from which no intimation of his moved her. The

nearest she came to speaking of Jeff was when she said that Jombateeste was going to work at the

brickyards in Cambridge as soon as the spring opened, and was not going to stay any longer at Lion's Head.

Her brother Frank, she reported, had got a place with part work in the drugandbook store at Lovewell,

where he could keep on more easily with his studies; he had now fully decided to study for the ministry; he

One day toward the end of April, when several weeks had passed without bringing Westover any word from

Cynthia, her father presented himself, and enjoyed in the painter's surprise the sensation of having dropped

upon him from the clouds. He gave due accounts of the health of each of his household; ending with

"Cynthia said he was coming. I didn't know he had come yet," said Westover. "I must go out and look him

" Well, I don't know but you'd better look us up at the same time," said Whitwell, with additional pleasure in

the painter's additional surprise. "I guess we're out in Cambridge, too," he added, at Westover's start of

question. "We're out there, visitin' one of our summer folks, as you might say. Remember Mis' Fredericks?"

"Why, what the deuce kept you from telling me so at once?" Westover demanded, indignantly.

Whitwell took advantage of Westover's moment of mystification to explain that Jeff had written over to him

from Italy, offering him a pretty good rent for his house, which he wanted to occupy while he was rebuilding

Lion's Head. He was going to push the work right through in the summer, and be ready for the season the

year after. That was what Whitwell understood, and he understood that Jeff's family was going to stay in

"So that's kind of turned us out of doors, as you may say, and Cynthia's always had this idee of comin' down

Boston way: and she didn't know anybody that could advise with her as well as Mis' Fredericks, and she

wrote to her, and Mis' Fredericks answered her to come right down and talk it over." Westover felt a pang of

resentment that Cynthia, had not turned to him for counsel, but he said nothing, and Whitwell went on: "She

said she was, ashamed to bother you, you'd had the whole neighborhood on your hands so much, and so she

Westover had a vague discomfort in it all, which ultimately defined itself as a discontent with the willingness

of the Whitwells to let Durgin occupy their house upon any terms, for any purpose, and a lingering grudge

that Cynthia should have asked help of any one but himself, even from a motive of delicacy.

In the evening he went out to see the girl at the house of Mrs. Fredericks, whom he found living in the Port.

They had a first moment of intolerable shyness on her part. He had been afraid to see her, with the jealousy

for her dignity he always felt, lest she should look as if she had been unhappy about Durgin. But he found her

looking, not only very well, but very happy and full of peace, as soon as that moment of shyness passed. It

seemed to Westover as if she had begun to live on new terms, and that a harassing element, which had always

been in it, had gone out of her life, and in its absence she was beginning to rejoice in a lasting repose. He

found himself rejoicing with her, and he found himself on simpler and franker terms with her than ever

before. Neither of them spoke of Jeff, or made any approach to mention him, and Westover believed that this

was not from a morbid feeling in her, but from a final and enduring indifference.

He saw her alone, for Mrs. Fredericks and her daughter had gone into town to a concert, which he made her

confess she would have gone to herself if it had not been that her father said he was coming out to see her.

She would not let him joke about the sacrifice he pretended she had made; he had a certain pain in fancying

that his visit was the highest and finest favor that life could do her. She told him of the ambition she had that

she might get a school somewhere in the neighborhood of Boston, and then find something for her brother to

do, while he began his studies in the Theological School at Harvard. Frank was still at Lovewell, it seemed.

At the end of the long call he made, he said, abruptly, when he had risen to go, "I should like to paint you."

"Who? Me?" she cried, as if it were the most incredible thing, while a glad color rushed over her face.

"Yes. While you're waiting to get your school, couldn't you come in with your father, now and then, and sit

"What's he want me to come fer?" Whitwell demanded, when the plan was laid before him. He was giving his

unlimited leisure to the exploration of Boston, and his tone expressed something of the injury, which he also

put into words, as a sole objection to the proposed interruption. "Can't you go alone, Cynthy ?" Cynthia said

she did not know, but when the point was referred to Mrs. Fredericks, she was sure Cynthia could not go

alone, and she acquainted them both, as far as she could, with that mystery of chaperonage which had never

touched their lives before. Whitwell seemed to think that his daughter would give the matter up; and perhaps

she might have done so, though she seemed reluctant, if Mrs. Fredericks had not further instructed them that

it was the highest possible honor Mr. Westover was offering them, and that if he had proposed to paint her

Whitwell found some compensation for the time lost to his study of Boston in the conversation of the painter,

which he said was worth a hundred cents on the dollar every time, though it dealt less with the metaphysical

aspect of the latest facts of science than the philosopher could have wished. He did not, to be sure, take very

much stock in the picture as it advanced, somewhat fitfully, with a good many reversions to its original state

of sketch. It appeared to him always a slight and feeble representation of Cynthia, though, of course, a native

politeness forbade him to express his disappointment. He avowed a faith in Westover's ability to get it right in

He felt less uneasy than at first, because he had now found a little furnished house in the woodenest outskirts

of North Cambridge, which he hired cheap from the recently widowed owner, and they were keeping house

there. Jombateeste lived with them, and worked in the brickyards. Out of hours he helped Cynthia, and kept

the ugly little place looking trim and neat, and left Whitwell free for the tramps home to nature, which he

began to take over the Belmont uplands as soon as the spring opened. He was not homesick, as Cynthia was

afraid he might be; his mind was fully occupied by the vast and varied interests opened to it by the

intellectual and material activities of the neighboring city; and he found ample scope for his physical energies

in doing Cynthia's errands, as well as studying the strange flora of the region. He apparently thought that he

had made a distinct rise and advance in the world. Sometimes, in the first days of his satisfaction with his

establishment, he expressed the wish that Jackson could only have seen how he was fixed, once. In his

preoccupation with other things, he no longer attempted to explore the eternal mysteries with the help of

planchette; the ungrateful instrument gathered as much dust as Cynthia would suffer on the whatnot in the

corner of the solemn parlor; and after two or three visits to the First Spiritual Temple in Boston, he lapsed

altogether from an interest in the other world, which had, perhaps, mainly flourished in the absence of

When at last Westover confessed that he had carried his picture of Cynthia as far as he could, Whitwell did

his best to hide his disappointment. "Well, sir," he said, tolerantly and even cheeringly, "I presume we're

every one of us a different person to whoever looks at us. They say that no two men see the same star."

"You mean that she doesn't look so to you," suggested the painter, who seemed not at all abashed.

"Well, you might say Why, here! It's like her; photograph couldn't get it any better; but it makes me

thinkwell, of a bird that you've come on sudden, and it stoops as if it was goin' to fly"

The painter could not make out at first whether the girl herself was pleased with the picture or not, and in his

uncertainty he could not give it her at once, as he had hoped and meant to do. It was by a kind of accident he

found afterward that she had always been passionately proud of his having painted her. This was when he

returned from the last sojourn he had made in Paris, whither he went soon after the Whitwells settled in North

Cambridge. He left the picture behind him to be framed and then sent to her with a letter he had written,

begging her to give it houseroom while he was gone. He got a short, stiff note in reply after he reached Paris,

and he had not tried to continue the correspondence. But as soon as he returned he went out to see the

Whitwells in North Cambridge. They were still in their little house there; the young widower had married

again; but neither he nor his new wife had cared to take up their joint life in his first home, and he had found

Whitwell such a good tenant that he had not tried to put up the rent on him. Frank was at home, now, with an

employment that gave him part of his time for his theological studies; Cynthia had been teaching school ever

since the fall after Westover went away, and they were all, as Whitwell said, in clover. He was the only

member of the family at home when Westover called on the afternoon of a warm summer day, and he

entertained him with a full account of a visit he had paid Lion's Head earlier in the season.

"Yes, sir," he said, as if he had already stated the fact, "I've sold my old place there to that devil." He said

devil without the least rancor; with even a smile of goodwill, and he enjoyed the astonishment Westover

"Yes; I see we never wanted to go back there to live, any of us, and I went up to pass the papers and close the

thing out. Well, I did have an offer for it from a feller that wanted to open a boa'din'house there and get the

advantage of Jeff's improvements, and I couldn't seem to make up my mind till I'd looked the ground over.

Fust off, you know, I thought I'd sell to the other feller, because I could see in a minute what a thorn it 'd be in

Jeff's flesh. But, dumn it all! When I met the comical devil I couldn't seem to want to pester him. Why, here,

thinks I, if we've made an escape from himand I guess we have, about the biggest escapewhat have I got

ag'in' him, anyway? I'd ought to feel good to him; and I guess that's the way I did feel, come to boil it down.

He's got a way with him, you know, when you're with him, that makes you like him. He may have a knife in

your ribs the whole while, but so long's he don't turn it, you don't seem to know it, and you can't help likin'

him. Why, I hadn't been with Jeff five minutes before I made up my mind to sell to him. I told him about the

other offerfelt bound to do itand he was all on fire. 'I want that place, Mr. Whitwell,' s'd he. 'Name your

price.' Well, I wa'n't goin' to take an advantage of the feller, and I guess he see it. 'You've offered me three

thousand,' s'd I, 'n' I don't want to be no ways mean about it. Five thousand buys the place.' 'It's mine,' s'd he;

just like that. I guess he see he had a gentleman to deal with, and we didn't say a word more. Don't you think I

done right to sell to him? I couldn't 'a' got more'n thirtyfive hundred out the other feller, to save me, and

before Jeff begun his improvements I couldn't 'a' realized a thousand dollars on the prop'ty."

"I think you did right to sell to him," said Westover, saddened somewhat by the proof Whitwell alleged of his

"Well, Sir, I'm glad you do. I don't believe in crowdin' a man because you got him in a corner, an' I don't

believe in bearin' malice. Never did. All I wanted was what the place was wo'thto him. 'Twa'n't wo'th

nothin' to me! He's got the house and the ten acres around it, and he's got the house on Lion's Head, includin'

the Clearin', that the poottiest picnicground in the mountains. Think of goin' up there this summer?"

"Well, I some wish yon did. I sh'd like to know how Jeff's improvements struck you. Of course, I can't judge

of 'em so well, but I guess he's made a pootty sightly thing of it. He told me he'd had one of the leadin' Boston

architects to plan the thing out for him, and I tell you he's got something nice. 'Tain't so big as old Lion's

Head, and Jeff wants to cater to a different style of custom, anyway. The buildin's longer'n what she is deep,

and she spreads in front so's to give as many rooms a view of the mountain as she can. Know what

'runnaysonce' is? Well, that's the style Jeff said it was; it's all pillars and pilasters; and you ride up to the

office through a double row of colyums, under a kind of a portico. It's all painted like them old Colonial

houses down on Brattle Street, buff and white. Well, it made me think of one of them old pagan temples. He's

got her shoved along to the south'ard, and he's widened out a piece of level for her to stand on, so 't that piece

o' wood up the hill there is just behind her, and I tell you she looks nice, backin' up ag'inst the trees. I tell you,

Jeff's got a head on him! I wish you could see that dinin'room o' his: all white colyums, and frontin' on the

view. Why, that devil's got a regular little theatyre back o' the dinin'room for the young folks to act

ammyture plays in, and the shows that come along, and he's got a dancehall besides; the parlors ain't

muchfolks like to set in the office; and a good many of the rooms are done off into soots, and got their own

parlors. I tell you, it's swell, as they say. You can order what you please for breakfast, but for lunch and

dinner you got to take what Jeff gives you; but he treats you well. He's a Durgin, when it comes to that.

Served in cou'ses, and dinner at seven o'clock. I don't know where he got his money for 't all, but I guess he

put in his insurance fust, and then he put a mortgage on the buildin'; be as much as owned it; said he'd had a

splendid season last year, and if he done as well for a copule of seasons more he'd have the whole prop'ty free

Westover could see that the prosperity of the unjust man had corrupted the imagination and confounded the

conscience of this simple witness, and he asked, in the hope of giving his praises pause: "What has he done

"Well, there!" said Whitwell. "That got me more than any other one thing: I naturally expected that Jeff 'd

had 'em moved, for you know and I know, Mr. Westover, that a place like that couldn't be very pop'la' with

summer folks; they don't want to have anything to kind of make 'em serious, as you may say. But that devil

got his architect to treat the place, as he calls it, and he put a high stone wall around it, and planted it to

bushes and evergreens so 't looks like a piece of old garden, down there in the corner of the orchard, and if

you didn't hunt for it you wouldn't know it was there. Jeff said 't when folks did happen to find it out, he

believed they liked it; they think it's picturesque and ancient. Why, some on 'em wanted him to put up a little

chapel alongside and have services there; and Jeff said he didn't know but he'd do it yet. He's got

darkcolored stones up for Mis' Durgin and Jackson, so 't they look as old as any of 'em. I tell you, he knows

"It seems so," said Westover, with a bitterness apparently lost upon the optimistic philosopher.

"Yes, sir. I guess it's all worked out for the best. So long's he didn't marry Cynthy, I don't care who he

married, andI guess he's made out fustrate, and he treats his wife well, and his motherinlaw, too. You

wouldn't hardly know they was in the house, they're so kind of quiet; and if a guest wants to see Jeff, he's got

to send and ask for him; clerk does everything, but I guess Jeff keeps an eye out and knows what's goin' on.

He's got an elegant soot of appartments, and he lives as private as if he was in his own house, him and his

wife. But when there's anything goin' on that needs a head, they're both right on deck.

"He don't let his wife worry about things a great deal; he's got a fust rate of a housekeeper, but I guess old

Mis' Vostrand keeps the housekeeper, as you may say. I hear some of the boa'ders talkin' up there, and one of

'em said 't the great thing about Lion's Head was 't you could feel everywheres in it that it was a lady's house.

I guess Jeff has a pootty good time, and a time 't suits him. He shows up on the coachin' parties, and he's got

himself a reg'lar English coachman's rig, with boots outside his trouse's, and a long coat and a fuzzy

plughat: I tell you, he looks gay! He don't spend his winters at Lion's Head: he is off to Europe about as

soon as the house closes in the fall, and he keeps bringin' home new dodges. Guess you couldn't get no boa'd

there for no seven dollars a week now! I tell you, Jeff's the gentleman now, and his wife's about the nicest

lady I ever saw. Do' know as I care so much about her mother; do' know as I got anything ag'inst her, either,

very much. But that little girl, Beechy, as they call her, she's a beauty! And round with Jeff all the while! He

seems full as fond of her as her own mother does, and that devil, that couldn't seem to get enough of

tormentin' little children when he was a boy, is as good and gentle with that little thing aspie!"

Whitwell seemed to have come to an end of his celebration of Jeff's success, and Westover asked:

"And what do you make now, of planchette's brokenshaft business? Or don't you believe in planchette any

Whitwell's beaming face clouded. "Well, sir, that's a thing that's always puzzled me. If it wa'n't that it was

Jackson workin' plantchette that night, I shouldn't placed much dependence on what she said; but Jackson

could get the truth out of her, if anybody could. Sence I b'en up there I b'en figurin' it out like this: the broken

Whitwell stopped midway in his suggestion, with an inquiring eye on the painter, who asked: "You think he's

"Well, sir, you got me there," the philosopher confessed. "I didn't see anything to the contrary, but come to

"Why couldn't the broken shaft be his unfulfilled destiny on the old lines? What reason is there to believe he

"People don't change in a day, or a year," Westover went on, "or two or three years, even. Sometimes I doubt

"Well, all that I thought," Whitwell urged, faintly, against the hard scepticism of a man ordinarily so yielding,

"is 't there must be a moral government of the universe somewheres, and if a bad feller is to get along and

"There wasn't any moral government of the universe? Not the way I see it," said Westover. "A tree brings

forth of its kind. As a man sows he reaps. It's dead sure, pitilessly sure. Jeff Durgin sowed success, in a

certain way, and he's reaping it. He once said to me, when I tried to waken his conscience, that he should get

where he was trying to go if he was strong enough, and being good had nothing to do with it. I believe now

he was right. But he was wrong too, as such a man always is. That kind of tree bears Dead Sea apples, after

all. He sowed evil, and he must reap evil. He may never know it, but he will reap what he has sown. The

Whitwell scratched his head. "Well, sir, there's something in what you say, I guess. But here! What's the use

of thinkin' a man can't change? Wa'n't there ever anything in that old idee of a change of heart? What do you

s'pose made Jeff let up on that feller that Jombateeste see him have down, that day, in my Clearin'? What Jeff

would natch'ly done would b'en to shake the life out of him; but he didn't; he let him up, and he let him go.

"We don't know all the ins and outs of that business," said Westover, after a moment. " I've puzzled over it a

good deal. The man was the brother of that girl that Jeff had jilted in Boston. I've found out that much. I don't

know just the size and shape of the trouble between them, but Jeff may have felt that he had got even with his

enemy before that day. Or he may have felt that if he was going in for full satisfaction, there was Jombateeste

"That's true," said Whitwell, greatly daunted. After a while he took refuge in the reflection, "Well, he's a

Westover said, in a sort of absence: "Perhaps we're all broken shafts, here. Perhaps that old hypothesis of

another life, a world where there is room enough and time enough for all the beginnings of this to complete

"Well, now you're shoutin'," said Whitwell. "And if plantchette" Westover rose. "Why, a'n't you goin' to

wait and see Cynthy ? I'm expectin' her along every minute now; she's just gone down to Harvard Square.

" Well, you must see your picture, anyway. We've got it in the parlor. I don't know what she'll say to me,

Whitwell led him into the little dark front hall, and into the parlor, less dim than it should have been because

the afternoon sun was burning full upon its shutters. The portrait hung over the mantel, in a bad light, but the

"Well, she ha'n't took wing yet, I'm thankful to think," said Whitwell, and he spoke from his own large mind

to the sympathy of an old friend who he felt could almost share his feelings as a father.

When Westover turned out of the baking little street where the Whitwells lived into an elmshaded stretch of

North Avenue, he took off his hat and strolled bareheaded along in the cooler air. He was disappointed not to

have seen Cynthia, and yet he found himself hurrying away after his failure, with a sense of escape, or at least

What he had come to say, to do, was the effect of long experience and much meditation. The time had arrived

when he could no longer feign to himself that his feelings toward the girl were not those of a lover, but he had

his modest fears that she could never imagine him in that character, and that if he should ask her to do so he

During this last absence of his he had let his fancy dwell constantly upon her, until life seemed worth having

only if she would share it with him. He was an artist, and he had always been a bohemian, but at heart he was

philistine and bourgeois. His ideal was a settlement, a fixed habitation, a stated existence, a home where he

could work constantly in an air of affection, and unselfishly do his part to make his home happy. It was a very

simplehearted ambition, and I do not quite know how to keep it from appearing commonplace and almost

sordid; but such as it was, I must confess that it was his. He had not married his model, because he was

mainly a landscapist, perhaps; and he had not married any of his pupils, because he had not been in love with

them, charming and good and lovely as he had thought some of them; and of late he had realized more and

more why his fancy had not turned in their direction. He perceived that it was already fixed, and possibly had

He did not blink the fact that there were many disparities, and that there would be certain disadvantages

which could never be quite overcome. The fact had been brought rather strenuously home to him by his

interview with Cynthia's father. He perceived, as indeed he had always known, that with a certain imaginative

lift in his thinking and feeling, Whitwell was irreparably rustic, that he was and always must be practically

Yankee. Westover was not a Yankee, and he did not love or honor the type, though its struggles against itself

touched and amused him. It made him a little sick to hear how Whitwell had profited by Durgin's necessity,

and had taken advantage of him with conscientious and selfapplausive rapacity, while he admired his

prosperity, and tried to account for it by doubt of its injustice. For a moment this seemed to him worse than

Durgin's conscientious toughness, which was the antithesis of Whitwell's remorseless selfinterest. For the

moment this claimed Cynthia of its kind, and Westover beheld her rustic and Yankee of her father's type. If

she was not that now, she would grow into that through the lapse from the personal to the ancestral which we

The sight of her face as he had pictured it, and of the soul which be had imagined for it, restored him to a

better sense of her, but he felt the need of escaping from the suggestion of her father's presence, and taking

further thought. Perhaps he should never again reach the point that he was aware of deflecting from now; he

filled his lungs with long breaths, which he exhaled in sighs of relief. It might have been a mistake on the

spiritual as well as the worldly side; it would certainly not have promoted his career; it might have impeded

it. These misgivings flitted over the surface of thought that more profoundly was occupied with a question of

other things. In the time since he had seen her last it might very well be that a young and pretty girl had met

some one who had taken her fancy; and he could not be sure that her fancy had ever been his, even if this had

not happened. He had no proof at all that she had ever cared or could care for him except gratefully,

respectfully, almost reverentially, with that mingling of filial and maternal anxiety which had hitherto been

the warmest expression of her regard. He tried to reason it out, and could not. He suddenly found himself

bitterly disappointed that he had missed seeing her, for if they had met, he would have known by this time

what to think, what to hope. He felt old he felt fully thirtysix years oldas he passed his hand over his

crown, whose gossamer growth opposed so little resistance to his touch. He had begun to lose his hair early,

but till then he had not much regretted his baldness. He entered into a little question of their comparative

ages, which led him to the conclusion that Cynthia must now be about twenty five.

Almost at the same moment he saw her coming up the walk toward him from far down the avenue. For a

reason, or rather a motive, of his own he pretended to himself that it was not she, but he knew instantly that it

was, and he put on his hat. He could see that she did not know him, and it was a pretty thing to witness the

recognition dawn on her. When it had its full effect, he was aware of a flutter, a pause in her whole figure

before she came on toward him, and he hurried his steps for the charm of her beautiful blushing face.

It was the spiritual effect of figure and face that he had carried in his thought ever since he had arrived at that

onesided intimacy through his study of her for the picture he had just seen. He had often had to ask himself

whether he had really perceived or only imagined the character he had translated into it; but here, for the

moment at least, was what he had seen. He hurried forward and joyfully took the hand she gave him. He

thought he should speak of that at once, but it was not possible, of course. There had to come first the

unheeded questions and answers about each other's health, and many other commonplaces. He turned and

walked home with her, and at the gate of the little ugly house she asked him if he would not come in and take

Her father talked with him while she got the tea, and when it was ready her brother came in from his walk

home out of Old Cambridge and helped her put it on the table. He had grown much taller than Westover, and

he was very ecclesiastical in his manner; more so than he would be, probably, if he ever be came a bishop,

Westover decided. Jombateeste, in an interval of suspended work at the brick yard, was paying a visit to his

All the time while they sat at table and talked together Westover realized more and more that for him, at least,

the separation of the last two years had put that space between them which alone made it possible for them to

approach each other on new ground. A kind of horror, of repulsion, for her engagement to Jeff Durgin had

ceased from his sense of her; it was as if she had been unhappily married, and the man, who had been

unworthy and unkind, was like a ghost who could never come to trouble his joy. He was more her

contemporary, he found, than formerly; she had grown a great deal in the past two years, and a certain

affliction which her father's fixity had given him concerning her passed in the assurance of change which she

She had changed her world, and grown to it, but her nature had not changed. Even her look had not changed,

and he told her how he had seen his picture in her at the moment of their meeting in the street. They all went

in to verify his impression from the painting. "Yes, that is the way you looked."

Frank went about the housework, and left her to their guest. When Whitwell came back from the

postoffice, where he said he would only be gone a minute, he did not rejoin Westover and Cynthia in the

The parlor door was shut; he had risked his fate, and they were talking it over. Cynthia was not sure; she was

sure of nothing but that there was no one in the world she cared for so much; but she was not sure that was

enough. She did not pretend that she was surprised; she owned that she had sometimes expected it; she

Westover said that he did not blame her for not knowing her mind; he had been fifteen years learning his own

fully. He asked her to take all the time she wished. If she could not make sure after all, he should always be

sure that she was wise and good. She told him everything there was to tell of her breaking with Jeff, and he

After a certain time they went for a walk in the warm summer moonlight under the elms, where they had met

"I suppose," she said, as they drew near her door again, "that people don't often talk it over as we've done."

"We only know from the novels," he answered. "Perhaps people do, oftener than is ever known. I don't see

"I've never wished to be sure of you so much as since you've wished to be sure of yourself."

"And I've never been so sure as since you were willing to let me," said Cynthia.

"I am glad of that. Try to think of me, if that will help my cause, as some one you might have always known

in this way. We don't really know each other yet. I'm a great deal older than you, but still I'm not so very old."

"Oh, I don't care for that. All I want to be certain of is that the feeling I have is reallythe feeling."

"I know, dear," said Westover, and his heart surged toward her in his tenderness for her simple conscience,

her wise question. "Take time. Don't hurry. Forget what I've saidor no; that's absurd! Think of it; but don't

She stood thinking, as if the question were crucial. Then she said, firmly, "I should always have to call you