the failure I shall make of it."

She smiled, as if she liked his lightness, but doubted if she ought. "We
don't often get Lion's Head clear of snow."

"Yes; that's another hardship," said the painter. "Everything is against
me! If we don't have a snow overnight, and a cloudy day to-morrow, I
shall be in despair."

She played with the little wheel of the wick; she looked down, and then,
with a glance flashed at him, she gasped: "I shall have to take your
lamp for the table tea is ready."

"Oh, well, if you will only take me with it. I'm frightfully hungry."

Apparently she could not say anything to that. He tried to get the lamp
to carry it out for her, but she would not let him. "It isn't heavy,"
she said, and hurried out before him.

It was all nothing, but it was all very charming, and Westover was
richly content with it; and yet not content, for he felt that the
pleasure of it was not truly his, but was a moment of merely borrowed
happiness.

The table was laid in the old farm-house sitting-room where he had been
served alone when he first came to Lion's Head. But now he sat down with
the whole family, even to Jombateeste, who brought in a faint odor of
the barn with him.

They had each been in contact with the finer world which revisits
nature in the summer-time, and they must all have known something of its
usages, but they had reverted in form and substance to the rustic living
of their neighbors. They had steak for Westover, and baked potatoes; but
for themselves they had such farm fare as Mrs. Durgin had given him the
first time he supped there. They made their meal chiefly of doughnuts
and tea, and hot biscuit, with some sweet dishes of a festive sort added
in recognition of his presence; and there was mince-pie for all. Mrs.
Durgin and Whitwell ate with their knives, and Jombateeste filled
himself so soon with every implement at hand that he was able to ask
excuse of the others if he left them for the horses before they had
half finished. Frank Whitwell fed with a kind of official or functional
conformity to the ways of summer folks; but Cynthia, at whom Westover
glanced with anxiety, only drank some tea and ate a little bread and
butter. He was ashamed of his anxiety, for he had owned that it ought
not to have mattered if she had used her knife like her father; and it
seemed to him as if he had prompted Mrs. Durgin by his curious glance
to say: "We don't know half the time how the child lives. Cynt