rent, and even then we're apt to go back to our old shape. When
you look at it in that light, marriage seems impossible. Yet it takes
place every day!"

"It's a great risk for a woman," said Jackson, putting on his hat and
stirring for an onward movement. "But I presume that if the man is
honest with her it's the best thing she can have. The great trouble is
for the man to be honest with her."

"Honesty is difficult," said Westover.

He made Jackson promise to spend a day with him in Boston, on his way to
take the Mediterranean steamer at New York. When they met he yielded to
an impulse which the invalid's forlornness inspired, and went on to see
him off. He was glad that he did that, for, though Jackson was not sad
at parting, he was visibly touched by Westover's kindness.

Of course he talked away from it. "I guess I've left 'em in pretty good
shape for the winter at Lion's Head," he said. "I've got Whitwell to
agree to come up and live in the house with mother, and she'll have
Cynthy with her, anyway; and Frank and Jombateeste can look after the
bosses easy enough."

He had said something like this before, but Westover could see that it
comforted him to repeat it, and he encouraged him to do so in full. He
made him talk about getting home in the spring, after the frost was
out of the ground, but he questioned involuntarily, while the sick man
spoke, whether he might not then be lying under the sands that had
never known a frost since the glacial epoch. When the last warning for
visitors to go ashore came, Jackson said, with a wan smile, while he
held Westover's hand: "I sha'n't forget this very soon."

"Write to me," said Westover.

Part II.

XXVII.

Jackson kept his promise to write to Westover, but he was better than
his word to his mother, and wrote to her every week that winter.

"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 post-office 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 ox-teams in
the morning. But Mrs. Durgin had studied the steamer days and calculated
the time it would take letters to come from New Yor