find his voice quite as promptly as before. He cleared his
throat before he asked: "Has Mr. Westover been saying anything about
me?"

"I don't know what you mean, exactly; but I presume you do."

"Well, then--I always expected to tell you--I did have a fancy for that
girl, for Miss Vostrand, and I told her so. It's like something that
never happened. She wouldn't have me. That's all."

"And you expect me to take what she wouldn't have?"

"If you like to call it that. But I should call it taking a man that had
been out of his head for a while, and had come to his senses again."

"I don't know as I should ever feel safe with a man that had been out of
his head once."

"You wouldn't find many men that hadn't," said Jeff, with a laugh that
was rather scornful of her ignorance.

"No, I presume not," she sighed. "She was beautiful, and I believe she
was good, too. She was very nice. Perhaps I feel strangely about it.
But, if she hadn't been so nice, I shouldn't have been so willing that
you should have cared for her."

"I suppose I don't understand," said Jeff, "but I know I was hard hit.
What's the use? It's over. She's married. I can't go back and unlive it
all. But if you want time to think--of course you do--I've taken time
enough--"

He was about to lift the reins on the mare's back as a sign to her that
the talk was over for the present, and to quicken her pace, when Cynthia
put out her hand and laid it on his, and said with a certain effect
of authority: "I shouldn't want you should give up your last year in
Harvard."

"Just as you say, Cynthy;" and in token of intelligence he wound his arm
round her neck and kissed her. It was not the first kiss by any means;
in the country kisses are not counted very serious, or at all binding,
and Cynthia was a country girl; but they both felt that this kiss sealed
a solemn troth between them, and that a common life began for them with
it.

XXII.

Cynthia came back in time to go into the dining-room and see that all
was in order there for supper before the door opened. The waitresses
knew that she had been out riding, as they called it, with Jeff Durgin;
the fact had spread electrically to them where they sat in a shady angle
of the hotel listening to one who read a novel aloud, and skipped all
but the most exciting love parts. They conjectured that the pair had
gone to Lovewell, but they knew nothing more, and the subtlest of
them would not have found reason