ant to tell you the truth as soon as I could get at you; but I
had to say erysipelas in my letter. I guess, if you don't mind, we'll let
erysipelas stand, with the rest."

"I shouldn't have cared," Westover said, "if you'd let it stand with me."

"Oh, thank you," Jeff returned.

There could have been no show of affection at his meeting with Jackson
even if there had been any fact of it; that was not the law of their
life. But Jeff had always been a turbulent, rebellious, younger brother,
resentful of Jackson's control, too much his junior to have the
associations of an equal companionship in the past, and yet too near him
in age to have anything like a filial regard for him. They shook hands,
and each asked the other how he was, and then they seemed to have done
with each other. Jeff's mother kissed him in addition to the handshaking,
but made him feel her preoccupation with Jackson; she asked him if he had
hurried home on Jackson's account, and he promptly lied her out of this
anxiety.

He shook hands with Cynthia, too, but it was across the barrier which had
not been lowered between them since they parted. He spoke to Jackson
about her, the day after he came home, when Jackson said he was feeling
unusually strong and well, and the two brothers had strolled out through
the orchard together. Now and then he gave the sick man his arm, and when
he wanted to sit down in a sunny place he spread the shawl he carried for
him.

"I suppose mother's told you about Cynthy and me, Jackson?" he began.

Jackson answered, with lack-lustre eyes, "Yes." Presently he asked:
"What's become of the other girl?"

"Damn her! I don't know what's become of her, and I don't care!" Jeff
exploded, furiously.

"Then you don't care for her any more?" Jackson pursued, with the same
languid calm.

"I never cared for her."

Jackson was silent, and the matter seemed to have faded out of his mind.
But it was keenly alive in Jeff's mind, and he was in the strange
necessity which men in the flush of life and health often feel of seeking
counsel of those who stand in the presence of death, as if their words
should have something of the mystical authority of the unknown wisdom
they are about to penetrate.

"What I want to know is, what I am going to do about Cynthy?"

"I don't know," Jackson answered, vaguely, and he expressed by his
indirection the sense he must sometimes have had of his impending
fate--"I don't know what she's going to do,