abroad, and
Jackson said it might be about as well; he should soon be around, and
he thought if Jeff went it would give Cynthia more of a chance to get
reconciled. After all, his mother suggested, a good many fellows behaved
worse than Jeff had done and still had made it up with the girls they
were engaged to; and Jackson gently assented.

He did not talk with Cynthia about Jeff, out of that delicacy, or that
coldness, common to them both. Perhaps it was not necessary for them to
speak of him; perhaps they understood him aright in their understanding
of each other.

Westover stayed on, day after day, thinking somehow that he ought to
wait till Jeff came. There were only a few other people in the hotel,
and these were of a quiet sort; they were not saddened by the presence
of a doomed man under the same roof, as gayer summer folks might have
been, and they were themselves no disturbance to him.

He sat about with them on the veranda, and he made friends among
them, and they did what they could to encourage and console him in his
impatience to take up his old cares in the management of the hotel. The
Whitwells easily looked after the welfare of the guests, and Jackson was
so much better to every one's perception that Westover could honestly
write Jeff a good report of him.

The report may have been so good that Jeff took the affair too easily.
It was a fortnight after Jackson's return to Lion's Head when he began
to fail so suddenly and alarmingly that Westover decided upon his
own responsibility to telegraph Jeff of his condition. But he had the
satisfaction of Whitwell's approval when he told him what he had done.

"Of course, Jackson a'n't long for this world. Anybody but him and his
mother could see that; and now he's just melting away, as you might say.
I ha'n't liked his not carin' to work plantchette since he got back;
looked to me from the start that he kind of knowed that it wa'n't worth
while for him to trouble about a world that he'll know all about so
soon, anyways; and d' you notice he don't seem to care about Mars,
either? I've tried to wake him up on it two-three times, but you can't
git him to take an interest. I guess Jeff can't git here any too soon
on Jackson's account; but as far forth as I go, he couldn't git here too
late. I should like to take the top of his head off."

Westover had been in Whitwell's confidence since their first chance of
speech together. He now said:

"I know it will be ra