med the happiness, or at least
the will, of the nature which made it. All the same it seemed a waste, in
its relation to the man she was to marry.

Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia sat by the lamp and sewed at night, or listened
to the talk of the men. If Westover read aloud, they whispered together
from time to time about some matters remote from it, as women always do
where there is reading. It was quiet, but it was not dull for Westover,
who found himself in no hurry to get back to town.

Sometimes he thought of the town with repulsion; its unrest, its vacuous,
troubled life haunted him like a memory of sickness; but he supposed that
when he should be quite well again all that would change, and be as it
was before. He interested himself, with the sort of shrewd ignorance of
it that Cynthia showed in the questions she asked about it now and then
when they chanced to be left alone together. He fancied that she was
trying to form some intelligible image of Jeff's environment there, and
was piecing together from his talk of it the impressions she had got from
summer folks. He did his best to help her, and to construct for her a
veritable likeness of the world as far as he knew it.

A time came when he spoke frankly of Jeff in something they were saying,
and she showed no such shrinking as he had expected she would; he
reflected that she might have made stricter conditions with Mrs. Durgin
than she expected to keep herself in mentioning him. This might well have
been necessary with the mother's pride in her son, which knew no stop
when it once began to indulge itself. What struck Westover more than the
girl's self-possession when they talked of Jeff was a certain austerity
in her with regard to him. She seemed to hold herself tense against any
praise of him, as if she should fail him somehow if she relaxed at all in
his favor.

This, at least, was the rather mystifying impression which Westover got
from her evident wish to criticise and understand exactly all that he
reported, rather than to flatter herself from it. Whatever her motive
was, he was aware that through it all she permitted herself a closer and
fuller trust of himself. At times it was almost too implicit; he would
have liked to deserve it better by laying open all that had been in his
heart against Jeff. But he forbore, of course, and he took refuge, as
well as he could, in the respect by which she held herself at a reverent
distance from him when he could not whol