sitting-room where he had been
served alone when he first came to Lion's Head. But now he sat down with
the whole family, even to Jombateeste, who brought in a faint odor of the
barn with him.

They had each been in contact with the finer world which revisits nature
in the summer-time, and they must all have known something of its usages,
but they had reverted in form and substance to the rustic living of their
neighbors. They had steak for Westover, and baked potatoes; but for
themselves they had such farm fare as Mrs. Durgin had given him the first
time he supped there. They made their meal chiefly of doughnuts and tea,
and hot biscuit, with some sweet dishes of a festive sort added in
recognition of his presence; and there was mince-pie for all. Mrs. Durgin
and Whitwell ate with their knives, and Jombateeste filled himself so
soon with every implement at hand that he was able to ask excuse of the
others if he left them for the horses before they had half finished.
Frank Whitwell fed with a kind of official or functional conformity to
the ways of summer folks; but Cynthia, at whom Westover glanced with
anxiety, only drank some tea and ate a little bread and butter. He was
ashamed of his anxiety, for he had owned that it ought not to have
mattered if she had used her knife like her father; and it seemed to him
as if he had prompted Mrs. Durgin by his curious glance to say: "We don't
know half the time how the child lives. Cynthy! Take something to eat!"

Cynthia pleaded that she was not hungry; Mrs. Durgin declared that she
would die if she kept on as she was going; and then the girl escaped to
the kitchen on one of the errands which she made from time to time
between the stove and the table.

"I presume it's your coming, Mr. Westover," Mrs. Durgin went on, with the
comfortable superiority of elderly people to all the trials of the young.
"I don't know why she should make a stranger of you, every time. You've
known her pretty much all her life."

"Ever since you give Jeff what he deserved for scaring her and Frank with
his dog," said Whitwell.

"Poor Fox!" Mrs. Durgin sighed. "He did have the least sense for a dog I
ever saw. And Jeff used to be so fond of him! Well, I guess he got tired
of him, too, toward the last."

"He's gone to the happy hunting-grounds now. Colorady didn't agree with
him-or old age," said Whitwell. "I don't see why the Injuns wa'n't
right," he pursued, thoughtfully. "If they've got souls, w