be in love with this man if she did not resent what he had
done.

XLIII

Westover was sitting at an open window of his studio smoking out into
the evening air, and looking down into the thinly foliaged tops of the
public garden, where the electrics fainted and flushed and hissed. Cars
trooped by in the troubled street, scraping the wires overhead that
screamed as if with pain at the touch of their trolleys, and kindling
now and again a soft planet, as the trolleys struck the batlike plates
that connected the crossing lines. The painter was getting almost as
much pleasure out of the planets as pain out of the screams, and he was
in an after-dinner languor in which he was very reluctant to recognize a
step, which he thought he knew, on his stairs and his stairs-landing. A
knock at his door followed the sound of the approaching steps. He lifted
himself, and called out, inhospitably, "Come in!" and, as he expected,
Jeff Durgin came in. Westover's meetings with him had been an increasing
discomfort since his return from Lion's Head. The uneasiness which he
commonly felt at the first moment of encounter with him yielded less
and less to the influence of Jeff's cynical bonhomie, and it returned in
force as soon as they parted.

It was rather dim in the place, except for the light thrown up into
it from the turmoil of lights outside, but he could see that there was
nothing of the smiling mockery on Jeff's face which habitually expressed
his inner hardihood. It was a frowning mockery.

"Hello!" said Westover.

"Hello!" answered Jeff. "Any commands for Lion's Head?"

"What do you mean?"

"I'm going up there to-morrow. I've got to see Cynthia, and tell her
what I've been doing."

Westover waited a moment before he asked: "Do you want me to ask what
you've been doing?"

"I shouldn't mind it."

The painter paused again. "I don't know that I care to ask. Is it any
good?"

"No!" shouted Jeff. "It's the worst thing yet, I guess you'll think.
I couldn't have believed it myself, if I hadn't been through it. I
shouldn't have supposed I was such a fool. I don't care for the girl; I
never did."

"Cynthia?"

"Cynthia? No! Miss Lynde. Oh, try to take it in!" Jeff cried, with a
laugh at the daze in Westover's face. "You must have known about the
flirtation; if you haven't, you're the only one." His vanity in the fact
betrayed itself in his voice. "It came to a crisis last week, and we
tried to make each other believe