seen in
Europe, who told him that he had made a great gain, but he had better
hurry home as fast as he could, for he had got all the advantage he could
expect to have from his stay abroad, and now home air was the best thing
for him.

It could not be known how much of this he believed; he had, at any rate,
the pathetic hopefulness of his malady; but his mother believed it all,
and she nursed him with a faith in his recovery which Whitwell confided
to Westover was about as much as he wanted to see, for one while. She
seemed to grow younger in the care of him, and to get back to herself,
more and more, from the facts of Jeff's behavior, which had aged and
broken her. She had to tell Jackson about it all, but he took it with
that indifference to the things of this world which the approach of death
sometimes brings, and in the light of his passivity it no longer seemed
to her so very bad. It was a relief to have Jackson say, Well, perhaps it
was for the best; and it was a comfort to see how he and Cynthia took to
each other; it was almost as if that dreadful trouble had not been. She
told Jackson what hard work she had had to make Cynthia stay with her,
and how the girl had consented to stay only until Jeff came home; but she
guessed, now that Jackson had got back, he could make Cynthia see it all
in another light, and perhaps it would all come right again. She
consulted him about Jeff's plan of going abroad, and Jackson said it
might be about as well; he should soon be around, and he thought if Jeff
went it would give Cynthia more of a chance to get reconciled. After all,
his mother suggested, a good many fellows behaved worse than Jeff had
done and still had made it up with the girls they were engaged to; and
Jackson gently assented.

He did not talk with Cynthia about Jeff, out of that delicacy, or that
coldness, common to them both. Perhaps it was not necessary for them to
speak of him; perhaps they understood him aright in their understanding
of each other.

Westover stayed on, day after day, thinking somehow that he ought to wait
till Jeff came. There were only a few other people in the hotel, and
these were of a quiet sort; they were not saddened by the presence of a
doomed man under the same roof, as gayer summer folks might have been,
and they were themselves no disturbance to him.

He sat about with them on the veranda, and he made friends among them,
and they did what they could to encourage and console him