us leisure. Jombateeste himself came to Cynthia with his mending,
and her needle kept him tight and firm against the winter which it
amused Westover to realize was the Canuck's native element, insomuch
that there was now something incongruous in the notion of Jombateeste
and any other season.

The girl's motherly care of all the household did not leave Westover
out. Buttons appeared on garments long used to shifty contrivances
for getting on without them; buttonholes were restored to their proper
limits; his overcoat pockets were searched for gloves, and the gloves
put back with their finger-tips drawn close as the petals of a flower
which had decided to shut and be a bud again.

He wondered how he could thank her for his share of the blessing that
her passion for motherly care was to all the house. It was pathetic,
and he used sometimes to forecast her self-devotion with a tender
indignation, which included a due sense of his own present demerit. He
was not reconciled to the sacrifice because it seemed the happiness, or
at least the will, of the nature which made it. All the same it seemed a
waste, in its relation to the man she was to marry.

Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia sat by the lamp and sewed at night, or listened
to the talk of the men. If Westover read aloud, they whispered together
from time to time about some matters remote from it, as women always do
where there is reading. It was quiet, but it was not dull for Westover,
who found himself in no hurry to get back to town.

Sometimes he thought of the town with repulsion; its unrest, its
vacuous, troubled life haunted him like a memory of sickness; but he
supposed that when he should be quite well again all that would change,
and be as it was before. He interested himself, with the sort of shrewd
ignorance of it that Cynthia showed in the questions she asked about
it now and then when they chanced to be left alone together. He
fancied that she was trying to form some intelligible image of Jeff's
environment there, and was piecing together from his talk of it the
impressions she had got from summer folks. He did his best to help her,
and to construct for her a veritable likeness of the world as far as he
knew it.

A time came when he spoke frankly of Jeff in something they were saying,
and she showed no such shrinking as he had expected she would; he
reflected that she might have made stricter conditions with Mrs. Durgin
than she expected to keep herself in ment