ly respect himself.

XL.

One morning Westover got leave from Mrs. Durgin to help Cynthia open the
dim rooms and cold corridors at the hotel to the sun and air. She
promised him he should take his death, but he said he would wrap up warm,
and when he came to join the girl in his overcoat and fur cap, he found
Cynthia equipped with a woollen cloud tied around her head, and a little
shawl pinned across her breast.

"Is that all?" he reproached her. "I ought to have put on a single wreath
of artificial flowers and some sort of a blazer for this expedition.
Don't you think so, Mrs. Durgin?"

"I believe women can stand about twice as much cold as you can, the best
of you," she answered, grimly.

"Then I must try to keep myself as warm as I can with work," he said.
"You must let me do all the rough work of airing out, won't you,
Cynthia?"

"There isn't any rough work about it," she answered, in a sort of
motherly toleration of his mood, without losing anything of her filial
reverence.

She took care of him, he perceived, as she took care of her brother and
her father, but with a delicate respect for his superiority, which was no
longer shyness.

They began with the office and the parlor, where they flung up the
windows, and opened the doors, and then they opened the dining-room,
where the tables stood in long rows, with the chairs piled on them legs
upward. Cynthia went about with many sighs for the dust on everything,
though to Westover's eyes it all seemed frigidly clean. "If it goes on as
it has for the past two years," she said, "we shall have to add on a new
dining-room. I don't know as I like to have it get so large!"

"I never wanted it to go beyond the original farmhouse," said Westover.
"I've been jealous of every boarder but the first. I should have liked to
keep it for myself, and let the world know Lion's Head from my pictures."

"I guess Mrs. Durgin thinks it was your picture that began to send people
here."

"And do you blame me, too? What if the thing I'm doing now should make it
a winter resort? Nothing could save you, then, but a fire. I believe
that's Jeff's ambition. Only he would want to put another hotel in place
of this; something that would be more popular. Then the ruin I began
would be complete, and I shouldn't come any more; I couldn't bear the
sight."

"I guess Mrs. Durgin wouldn't think it was lion's Head if you stopped
coming," said Cynthia.

"But you would know better than