owner of it.

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

Westover forgot him in the fidget he fell into, trying this and that
effect, with his head slanted one way and then slanted the other, his
hand held up to shut out the mountain below the granite mass of Lion's
Head, and then changed to cut off the sky above; and then both hands
lifted in parallel to confine the picture. He made some tentative
scrawls on his canvas in charcoal, and he wasted so much time that the
light on the mountain-side began to take the rich tone of the afternoon
deepening to evening. A soft flush stole into it; the sun dipped behind
the top south of the mountain, and Lion's Head stood out against the
intense clearness of the west, which began to be flushed with exquisite
suggestions of violet and crimson.

"Good Lord!" said Westover; and he flew at his colors and began to
paint. He had got his canvas into such a state that he alone could have
found it much more intelligible than his palette, when he heard the boy
saying, over his shoulder: "I don't think that looks very much like
it." He had last been aware of the boy sitting at the grassy edge of the
lane, tossing small bits of earth and pebble across to his dog, which
sat at the other edge and snapped at them. Then he lost consciousness of
him. He answered, dreamily, while he found a tint he was trying for with
his brush: "Perhaps you don't know." He was so sure of his effect that
the popular censure speaking in the boy's opinion only made him happier
in it.

"I know what I see," said the boy.

"I doubt it," said Westover, and then he lost consciousness of him
again. He was rapt deep and far into the joy of his work, and had no
thought but for that, and for the dim question whether it would be such
another day to-morrow, with that light again on Lion's Head, when he was
at last sensible of a noise that he felt he must have been hearing some
time without noting it. It was a lamentable, sound of screaming, as of
some one in mortal terror, mixed with wild entreaties. "Oh, don't, Jeff!
Oh, don't, don't, don't! Oh, please! Oh, do let us be! Oh, Jeff, don't!"

Westover looked round bewildered, and not able, amid the clamor of the
echoes, to make out where the cries came from. Then, down at the point
where the lane joined the road to the southward and the road lost itself
in the shadow of a woodland, he sa