e
burden back again he saw Jeff Durgin leaping along the road toward the
school-house, whirling his satchel of books about his head and shouting
gayly to the girl, now hidden by the bushes at the other end of the
lane: "Cynthy! Oh, Cynthy! Wait for me! I want to tell you something!"

IX.

Westover, received next spring the copy for an advertisement from Mrs.
Durgin, which she asked to have him put in some paper for her. She said
that her son Jackson had written it out, and Westover found it so well
written that he had scarcely to change the wording. It offered the best
of farm-board, with plenty of milk and eggs, berries and fruit, for
five dollars a week at Lion's Head Farm, and it claimed for the farm the
merit of the finest view of the celebrated Lion's Head Mountain. It
was signed, as her letter was signed, "Mrs. J. M. Durgin," with her
post-office address, and it gave Westover as a reference.

The letter was in the same handwriting as the advertisement, which he
took to be that of Jackson Durgin. It enclosed a dollar note to pay for
three insertions of the advertisement in the evening Transcript, and
it ended, almost casually: "I do not know as you have heard that my
husband, James Monroe Durgin, passed to spirit life this spring. My son
will help me to run the house."

This death could not move Westover more than it had apparently moved
the widow. During the three weeks he had passed under his roof, he had
scarcely exchanged three words with James Monroe Durgin, who remained to
him an impression of large, round, dull-blue eyes, a stubbly upper
lip, and cheeks and chin tagged with coarse, hay-colored beard. The
impression was so largely the impression that he had kept of the
dull-blue eyes and the gaunt, slanted figure of Andrew Jackson Durgin
that he could not be very distinct in his sense of which was now the
presence and which the absence. He remembered, with an effort, that the
son's beard was straw-colored, but he had to make no effort to recall
the robust effect of Mrs. Durgin and her youngest son. He wondered now,
as he had often wondered before, whether she knew of the final violence
which had avenged the boy for the prolonged strain of repression Jeff
had inflicted upon himself during Westover's stay at the farm. After
several impulses to go back and beat him, to follow him to school and
expose him to the teacher, to write to his mother and tell her of his
misbehavior, Westover had decided to do