,
he could afford to be more generously amused than if he had suffered
damage in either. The more he thought of the incident, the more he was
disposed to be lenient with the boy, whom he was aware of having baffled
and subdued by his superior wit and virtue in perhaps intolerable
measure. He could not quite make out that it was an act of bad faith;
there was no reason to think that the good-natured things the fellow had
done, the constant little offices of zeal and friendliness, were less
sincere than this violent outbreak.

The letter from Lion's Head Farm brought back his three weeks there very
vividly, and made Westover wish he was going there for the summer. But he
was going over to France for an indefinite period of work in the only air
where he believed modern men were doing good things in the right way. He
W a sale in the winter, and he had sold pictures enough to provide the
means for this sojourn abroad; though his lion's Head Mountain had not
brought the two hundred and fifty or three hundred dollars he had hoped
for. It brought only a hundred and sixty; but the time had almost come
already when Westover thought it brought too much. Now, the letter from
Mrs. Durgin reminded him that he had never sent her the photograph of the
picture which he had promised her. He encased the photograph at once, and
wrote to her with many avowals of contrition for his neglect, and strong
regret that he was not soon to see the original of the painting again. He
paid a decent reverence to the bereavement she had suffered, and he sent
his regards to all, especially his comrade Jeff, whom he advised to keep
out of the apple-orchard.

Five years later Westover came home in the first week of a gasping
August, whose hot breath thickened round the Cunarder before she got
half-way up the harbor. He waited only to see his pictures through the
custom-house, and then he left for the mountains. The mountains meant
Lion's Head for him, and eight hours after he was dismounting from the
train at a station on the road which had been pushed through on a new
line within four miles of the farm. It was called Lion's Head House now,
as he read on the side of the mountain-wagon which he saw waiting at the
platform, and he knew at a glance that it was Jeff Durgin who was coming
forward to meet him and take his hand-bag.

The boy had been the prophecy of the man in even a disappointing degree.
Westover had fancied him growing up to the height of his