ith other things, he no longer
attempted to explore the eternal mysteries with the help of planchette;
the ungrateful instrument gathered as much dust as Cynthia would suffer
on the what-not in the corner of the solemn parlor; and after two
or three visits to the First Spiritual Temple in Boston, he lapsed
altogether from an interest in the other world, which had, perhaps,
mainly flourished in the absence of pressing subjects of inquiry, in
this.

When at last Westover confessed that he had carried his picture
of Cynthia as far as he could, Whitwell did his best to hide his
disappointment. "Well, sir," he said, tolerantly and even cheeringly, "I
presume we're every one of us a different person to whoever looks at us.
They say that no two men see the same star."

"You mean that she doesn't look so to you," suggested the painter, who
seemed not at all abashed.

"Well, you might say--Why, here! It's like her; photograph couldn't get
it any better; but it makes me think-well, of a bird that you've come on
sudden, and it stoops as if it was goin' to fly--"

"Ah," said Westover, "does it make you think of that?"

LIV.

The painter could not make out at first whether the girl herself was
pleased with the picture or not, and in his uncertainty he could not
give it her at once, as he had hoped and meant to do. It was by a kind
of accident he found afterward that she had always been passionately
proud of his having painted her. This was when he returned from the last
sojourn he had made in Paris, whither he went soon after the Whitwells
settled in North Cambridge. He left the picture behind him to be framed
and then sent to her with a letter he had written, begging her to give
it houseroom while he was gone. He got a short, stiff note in
reply after he reached Paris, and he had not tried to continue the
correspondence. But as soon as he returned he went out to see the
Whitwells in North Cambridge. They were still in their little house
there; the young widower had married again; but neither he nor his new
wife had cared to take up their joint life in his first home, and he had
found Whitwell such a good tenant that he had not tried to put up the
rent on him. Frank was at home, now, with an employment that gave him
part of his time for his theological studies; Cynthia had been teaching
school ever since the fall after Westover went away, and they were all,
as Whitwell said, in clover. He was the only member of the fami