as the captives of her
bow and spear."

"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 conditions, you know."

"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 ashore somehow."

"Yes, or all go down together." Jeff laughed, and ate Mrs. Bevidge's
bread-and-butter, 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, thought that he had possibly
wasted his excuses upon Jeff's self-complacence.

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, "Good-bye, dear!" To Jeff
she said, with the cold conscience of those whom their nobility obliges,
"I am always at home on Thursdays, Mr. Durgin."

"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 home with
her if he would not seem to do so.

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