long dresses, and he praised the dress which she had
on. He said it became her style; and he found such relief from his heavy
thoughts in these harmless pleasantries that he kept on with them. He
had involuntarily turned with her to walk back to her house on the way
he had come, and he asked her if he might not carry her catkins for her.
She had a sheaf of them in the hollow of her slender arm, which seemed
to him very pretty, and after a little struggle she yielded them to him.
The struggle gave him still greater relief from his self-reproach,
and at her gate he begged her to let him keep one switch of the
pussywillows, and he stood a moment wondering whether he might not
ask her for something else. She chose one from the bundle, and drew it
lightly across his face before she put it in his hand. "You may have
this for Cynthy," she said, and she ran laughingly up the pathway to her
door.

XLVI

Cynthia did not appear at dinner, and Jeff asked his mother when he saw
her alone if she had spoken to the girl. "Yes, but she said she did not
want to talk yet."

"All right," he returned. "I'm going to take a nap; I believe I feel as
if I hadn't slept for a month."

He slept the greater part of the afternoon, and came down rather dull to
the early tea. Cynthia was absent again, and his mother was silent and
wore a troubled look. Whitwell was full of a novel conception of the
agency of hypnotism in interpreting the life of the soul as it is
intimated in dreams. He had been reading a book that affirmed the
consubstantiality of the sleep-dream and the hypnotic illusion. He
wanted to know if Jeff, down at Boston, had seen anything of the
hypnotic doings that would throw light on this theory.

It was still full light when they rose from the table, and it was
scarcely twilight when Jeff heard Cynthia letting herself out at the
back door. He fancied her going down to her father's house, and he went
out to the corner of the hotel to meet her. She faltered a moment at
sight of him, and then kept on with averted face.

He joined her, and walked beside her. "Well, Cynthy, what are you going
to say to me? I'm off for Cambridge again to-morrow morning, and I
suppose we've got to understand each other. I came up here to put myself
in your hands, to keep or to throw away, just as you please. Well? Have
you thought about it?"

"Every minute," said the girl, quietly.

"Well?"

"If you had cared for me, it couldn't have happen