the way the feller's built, I presume, as much as anything."

His daughter waived the point. "I shouldn't feel just right if none of
us stayed in the old place. I should feel as if we had turned our backs
on Mrs. Durgin."

Her eyes shone, and her father said: "Well, I guess that's so, come to
think of it. She's been like a mother to you, this past year, ha'n't
she? And it must have come pootty hard for her, sidin' ag'in' Jeff. But
she done it."

The girl turned her head away. They were sitting in the little,
low keeping-room of Whitwell's house, and her father had his hat on
provisionally. Through the window they could see the light of the
lantern at the office door of the hotel, whose mass was lost in the dark
above and behind the lamp. It was all very still outside.

"I declare," Whitwell went on, musingly, "I wisht Mr. Westover was
here."

Cynthia started, but it was to ask: "Do you want I should help you with
your Latin, Frank?"

Whitwell came back an hour later and found them still at their books. He
told them it was all arranged; Durgin was to give up the place to him
in a week, and he was to surrender it again when Jeff came back in the
spring. In the mean time things were to remain as they were; after he
was gone, they could all go and live at Lion's Head if they chose.

"We'll see," said Cynthia. "I've been thinking that might be the best
way, after all. I might not get a school, it's so late."

"That's so," her father assented. "I declare," he added, after a
moment's muse, "I felt sorry for the feller settin' up there alone, with
nobody to do for him but that old thing he's got in. She can't cook any
more than--" He desisted for want of a comparison, and said: "Such a
lookin' table, too."

"Do you think I better go and look after things a little?" Cynthia
asked.

"Well, you no need to," said her father. He got down the planchette, and
labored with it, while his children returned to Frank's lessons.

"Dumn 'f I can make the thing work," he said to himself at last. "I
can't git any of 'em up. If Jackson was here, now!"

Thrice a day Cynthia went up to the hotel and oversaw the preparation of
Jeff's meals and kept taut the slack housekeeping of the old Irish woman
who had remained as a favor, after the hotel closed, and professed to
have lost the chance of a place for the winter by her complaisance.
She submitted to Cynthia's authority, and tried to make interest for an
indefinite stay by sudden ze