going on. At the approach of Jeff, and before
he could have made himself seen at the doorway, a tremor seemed to pass
over the figure; it fluttered to its feet, and then it vanished into
the farther dark of the room. When Jeff disappeared within, there was a
sound of rustling skirts and skurrying feet and the crash of a closing
door, and then the free rise of laughing voices without. After a
discreet interval, Westover said: "Mr. Whitwell, I must say good-night.
I've got another day's work before me. It's been a most interesting
evening."

"You must try it again," said Whitwell, hospitably. "We ha'n't got to
the bottom of that broken shaft yet. You'll see 't plantchette 'll have
something more to say about it: Heigh, Jackson?" He rose to receive
Westover's goodnight; the others nodded to him.

As the painter climbed the hill to the hotel he saw two figures on
the road below; the one in white drapery looked severed by a dark
line slanting across it at the waist. In the country, he knew, such
an appearance might mark the earliest stages of love-making, or
mere youthful tenderness, in which there was nothing more implied or
expected. But whatever the fact was, Westover felt a vague distaste for
it, which, as it related itself to a more serious possibility, deepened
to something like pain. It was probable that it should come to this
between those two, but Westover rebelled against the event with a sense
of its unfitness for which he could not give himself any valid reason;
and in the end he accused himself of being a fool.

Two ladies sat on the veranda of the hotel and watched a cloud-wreath
trying to lift itself from the summit of Lion's Head. In the effort it
thinned away to transparency in places; in others, it tore its frail
texture asunder and let parts of the mountain show through; then the
fragments knitted themselves loosely together, and the vapor lay again
in dreamy quiescence.

The ladies were older and younger, and apparently mother and daughter.
The mother had kept her youth in face and figure so admirably that
in another light she would have looked scarcely the elder. It was the
candor of the morning which confessed the fine vertical lines running
up and down to her lips, only a shade paler than the girl's, and that
showed her hair a trifle thinner in its coppery brown, her blue eyes
a little dimmer. They were both very graceful, and they had soft,
caressing voices; they now began to talk very politely t