boots outside his trouse's, and a long coat and a fuzzy plug-hat: I
tell you, he looks gay! He don't spend his winters at Lion's Head: he
is off to Europe about as soon as the house closes in the fall, and he
keeps bringin' home new dodges. Guess you couldn't get no boa'd there
for no seven dollars a week now! I tell you, Jeff's the gentleman now,
and his wife's about the nicest lady I ever saw. Do' know as I care so
much about her mother; do' know as I got anything ag'inst her, either,
very much. But that little girl, Beechy, as they call her, she's a
beauty! And round with Jeff all the while! He seems full as fond of her
as her own mother does, and that devil, that couldn't seem to get enough
of tormentin' little children when he was a boy, is as good and gentle
with that little thing as-pie!"

Whitwell seemed to have come to an end of his celebration of Jeff's
success, and Westover asked:

"And what do you make now, of planchette's brokenshaft business? Or
don't you believe in planchette any more?"

Whitwell's beaming face clouded. "Well, sir, that's a thing that's
always puzzled me. If it wa'n't that it was Jackson workin' plantchette
that night, I shouldn't placed much dependence on what she said; but
Jackson could get the truth out of her, if anybody could. Sence I b'en
up there I b'en figurin' it out like this: the broken shaft is the old
Jeff that he's left off bein'--"

Whitwell stopped midway in his suggestion, with an inquiring eye on the
painter, who asked: "You think he's left off being the old Jeff?"

"Well, sir, you got me there," the philosopher confessed. "I didn't see
anything to the contrary, but come to think of it--"

"Why couldn't the broken shaft be his unfulfilled destiny on the old
lines? What reason is there to believe he isn't what he's always been?"

"Well, come to think of it--"

"People don't change in a day, or a year," Westover went on, "or two or
three years, even. Sometimes I doubt if they ever change."

"Well, all that I thought," Whitwell urged, faintly, against the hard
scepticism of a man ordinarily so yielding, "is 't there must be a moral
government of the universe somewheres, and if a bad feller is to get
along and prosper hand over hand, that way, don't it look kind of as
if--"

"There wasn't any moral government of the universe? Not the way I see
it," said Westover. "A tree brings forth of its kind. As a man sows he
reaps. It's dead sure, pitilessly sure. Jeff Durgin