was little."

"Oh,--spirit! You don't know how much spirit I've had, now."

"Well, I presume not," Whitwell assented.

"I've been thinking," said the girl, after a little pause, "that we shall
have to go away from here."

"Well, I guess not," her father began. "Not for no Jeff Dur--"

"Yes, yes. We must! Don't make one talk about it. We'll stay here till
Jackson gets back in June, and then--we must go somewhere else. We'll go
down to Boston, and I'll try to get a place to teach, or something, and
Frank can get a place."

"I presume," Whitwell mused, "that Mr. Westover could--"

"Father!" cried the girl, with an energy that startled him, as she lifted
herself on her elbow. "Don't ever think of troubling Mr. Westover! Oh,"
she lamented, "I was thinking of troubling him myself! But we mustn't, we
mustn't! I should be so ashamed!"

"Well," said Whitwell, "time enough to think about all that. We got two
good months yet to plan it out before Jackson gets back, and I guess we
can think of something before that. I presume," he added, thoughtfully,
"that when Mrs. Durgin hears that you've give Jeff the sack, she'll make
consid'able of a kick. She done it when you got engaged."

XLVII.

After he went back to Cambridge, Jeff continued mechanically in the
direction given him by motives which had ceased for him. In the midst of
his divergence with Bessie Lynde he had still kept an inner fealty to
Cynthia, and tried to fulfil the purposes and ambition she had for him.
The operation of this habitual allegiance now kept him up to his work,
but the time must come when it could no longer operate, when his whole
consciousness should accept the fact known to his intelligence, and he
should recognize the close of that incident of his life as the bereaved
finally accept and recognize the fact of death.

The event brought him relief, and it brought him freedom. He was sensible
in his relaxation of having strained up to another's ideal, of having
been hampered by another's will. His pleasure in the relief was tempered
by a regret, not wholly unpleasant, for the girl whose aims, since they
were no longer his, must be disappointed. He was sorry for Cynthia, and
in his remorse he was fonder of her than he had ever been. He felt her
magnanimity and clemency; he began to question, in that wordless deep of
being where volition begins, whether it would not be paying a kind of
duty to her if he took her at her word and tried to go ba