after supper before his early bedtime. Frank Whitwell sat with his books
there, where Westover sometimes saw his sister helping him at his
studies. He was loyally faithful and obedient to her in all things. He
helped her with the dishes, and was not ashamed to be seen at this work;
she had charge of his goings and comings in society; he submitted to her
taste in his dress, and accepted her counsel on many points which he
referred to her, and discussed with her in low-spoken conferences. He
seemed a formal, serious boy, shy like his sister; his father let fall
some hints of a religious cast of mind in him. He had an ambition beyond
the hotel; he wished to study for the ministry; and it was not alone the
chance of going home with the girls that made him constant at the evening
meetings. "I don't know where he gits it," said his father, with a shake
of the head that suggested doubt of the wisdom of the son's preference of
theology to planchette.

Cynthia had the same care of her father as of her brother; she kept him
neat, and held him up from lapsing into the slovenliness to which he
would have tended if she had not, as Westover suspected, made constant
appeals to him for the respect due their guest. Mrs. Durgin, for her
part, left everything to Cynthia, with a contented acceptance of her
future rule and an abiding trust in her sense and strength, which
included the details of the light work that employed her rather luxurious
leisure. Jombateeste himself came to Cynthia with his mending, and her
needle kept him tight and firm against the winter which it amused
Westover to realize was the Canuck's native element, insomuch that there
was now something incongruous in the notion of Jombateeste and any other
season.

The girl's motherly care of all the household did not leave Westover out.
Buttons appeared on garments long used to shifty contrivances for getting
on without them; buttonholes were restored to their proper limits; his
overcoat pockets were searched for gloves, and the gloves put back with
their finger-tips drawn close as the petals of a flower which had decided
to shut and be a bud again.

He wondered how he could thank her for his share of the blessing that her
passion for motherly care was to all the house. It was pathetic, and he
used sometimes to forecast her self-devotion with a tender indignation,
which included a due sense of his own present demerit. He was not
reconciled to the sacrifice because it see