s! Perhaps it was as well for both that the door of the house opened
and the Honorable Alva interrupted their talk, and without so much as a
glance at Cynthia he got hurriedly into the sleigh and drove off. When
Cynthia turned, the points of color still high in her cheeks and the
light still ablaze in her eyes, she surprised Jethro gazing at her
from the porch, and some sorrow she felt rather than beheld stopped the
confession on her lips. It would be unworthy of her even to repeat such
slander, and the color surged again into her face for very shame of her
anger. Cassandra Hopkins had not been worthy of it.

Jethro did not speak, but slipped his hand into hers, and thus they
stood for a long time gazing at the snow fields between the pines on the
heights of Coniston.

The next summer, was the first which the painter--pioneer of summer
visitors there--spent at Coniston. He was an unsuccessful painter,
who became, by a process which he himself does not to-day completely
understand, a successful writer of novels. As a character, however, he
himself confesses his inadequacy, and the chief interest in him for the
readers of this narrative is that he fell deeply in love with Cynthia
Wetherell at nineteen. It is fair to mention in passing that other young
men were in love with Cynthia at this time, notably Eben Hatch--history
repeating itself. Once, in a moment of madness, Eben confessed his love,
the painter never did: and he has to this day a delicious memory which
has made Cynthia the heroine of many of his stories. He boarded with
Chester Perkins, and he was humored by the village as a harmless but
amiable lunatic.

The painter had never conceived that a New England conscience and a
temper of no mean proportions could dwell together in the body of a
wood nymph. When he had first seen Cynthia among the willows by Coniston
Water, he had thought her a wood nymph. But she scolded him for his
impropriety with so unerring a choice of words that he fell in love
with her intellect, too. He spent much of his time to the neglect of his
canvases under the butternut tree in front of Jethro's house trying to
persuade Cynthia to sit for her portrait; and if Jethro himself had not
overheard one of these arguments, the portrait never would have been
painted. Jethro focussed a look upon the painter.

"Er--painter-man, be you? Paint Cynthy's picture?"

"But I don't want to be painted, Uncle Jethro. I won't be painted!"

"H-how much f