iscomfited, 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 saw the boy leaping back and forth across
the track,