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 nothing. As he had come off unhurt in person and property