at least, was what he
had seen. He hurried forward and joyfully took the hand she gave him. He
thought he should speak of that at once, but it was not possible, of
course. There had to come first the unheeded questions and answers about
each other's health, and many other commonplaces. He turned and walked
home with her, and at the gate of the little ugly house she asked him if
he would not come in and take tea with them.

Her father talked with him while she got the tea, and when it was ready
her brother came in from his walk home out of Old Cambridge and helped
her put it on the table. He had grown much taller than Westover, and he
was very ecclesiastical in his manner; more so than he would be,
probably, if he ever became a bishop, Westover decided. Jombateeste, in
an interval of suspended work at the brick yard, was paying a visit to
his people in Canada, and Westover did not see him.

All the time while they sat at table and talked together Westover
realized more and more that for him, at least, the separation of the last
two years had put that space between them which alone made it possible
for them to approach each other on new ground. A kind of horror, of
repulsion, for her engagement to Jeff Durgin had ceased from his sense of
her; it was as if she had been unhappily married, and the man, who had
been unworthy and unkind, was like a ghost who could never come to
trouble his joy. He was more her contemporary, he found, than formerly;
she had grown a great deal in the past two years, and a certain
affliction which her father's fixity had given him concerning her passed
in the assurance of change which she herself gave him.

She had changed her world, and grown to it, but her nature had not
changed. Even her look had not changed, and he told her how he had seen
his picture in her at the moment of their meeting in the street. They all
went in to verify his impression from the painting. "Yes, that is the way
you looked."

"It seems to me that is the way I felt," she asserted.

Frank went about the house-work, and left her to their guest. When
Whitwell came back from the post-office, where he said he would only be
gone a minute, he did not rejoin Westover and Cynthia in the parlor.

The parlor door was shut; he had risked his fate, and they were talking
it over. Cynthia was not sure; she was sure of nothing but that there was
no one in the world she cared for so much; but she was not sure that was
enough. She