uccessive pipes while the others talked, and to catch through
his smoke-wreaths vague glimpses of their meanings, was enough. He felt
that in being promoted to the care of the stables in Jackson's absence he
occupied a dignified and responsible position, with a confidential
relation to the exile which justified him in sending special messages to
him, and attaching peculiar value to Jackson's remembrances.

The exile's letters said very little about his health, which in the sense
of no news his mother held to be good news, but they were full concerning
the monuments and the ethnological interest of life in Egypt.

They were largely rescripts of each day's observations and experiences,
close and full, as his mother liked them in regard to fact, and
generously philosophized on the side of politics and religion for
Whitwell. The Eastern question became in the snow-choked hills of New
England the engrossing concern of this speculative mind, and he was apt
to spring it upon Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia at mealtimes and other
defenceless moments. He tried to debate it with Jombateeste, who
conceived of it as a form of spiritualistic inquiry, and answered from
the hay-loft, where he was throwing down fodder for the cattle to
Whitwell, volubly receiving it on the barn floor below, that he believed,
him, everybody got a hastral body, English same as Mormons.

"Guess you mean Moslems," said Whitwell, and Jombateeste asked the
difference, defiantly.

The letters which came to Cynthia could not be made as much a general
interest, and, in fact, no one else cared so much for them as for
Jackson's letters, not even Jeff's mother. After Cynthia got one of them,
she would ask, perfunctorily, what Jeff said, but when she was told there
was no news she did not press her question.

"If Jackson don't get back in time next summer," Mrs. Durgin said, in one
of the talks she had with the girl, "I guess I shall have to let Jeff and
you run the house alone."

"I guess we shall want a little help from you," said Cynthia, demurely.
She did not refuse the implication of Mrs. Durgin's words, but she would
not assume that there was more in them than they expressed.

When Jeff came home for the three days' vacation at Thanksgiving, he
wished again to relinquish his last year at Harvard, and Cynthia had to
summon all her forces to keep him to his promise of staying. He brought
home the books with which he was working off his conditions, with a
half-he