ck to Bessie
Lynde. But for the present he did nothing but renounce all notion of
working at his conditions, or attempting to take a degree. That was part
of a thing that was past, and was no part of anything to come, so far as
Jeff now forecast his future.

He did not choose to report himself to Westover, and risk a scolding, or
a snubbing. He easily forgave Westover for the tone he had taken at their
last meeting, but he did not care to see him. He would have met him
half-way, however, in a friendly advance, and he was aware of much
good-will toward him, which he could not have been reluctant to show if
chance had brought them together.

Jeff missed Cynthia's letters which used to come so regularly every
Tuesday, and he had a half-hour every Sunday which was at first rather
painfully vacant since he no longer wrote to her. But in this vacancy he
had at least no longer the pang of self-reproach which her letters always
brought him, and he was not obliged to put himself to the shame of
concealment in writing to her. He had never minded that tacit lying on
his own account, but he hated it in relation to her; it always hurt him
as something incongruous and unfit. He wrote to his mother now on Sunday,
and in his first letter, while the impression of Cynthia's dignity and
generosity was still vivid, he urged her to make it clear to the girl
that he wished her and her family to remain at Lion's Head as if nothing
had happened. He put a great deal of real feeling into this request, and
he offered to go and spend a year in Europe, if his mother thought that
Cynthia would be more reconciled to his coming back at the end of that
time.

His mother answered with a dryness to which his ear supplied the tones of
her voice, that she would try to get along in the management of Lion's
Head till his brother got back, but that she had no objection to his
going to Europe for a year if he had the money to spare. Jeff could not
refuse her joke, as he felt it, a certain applause, but he thought it
pretty rough that his mother should take part so decidedly against him as
she seemed to be doing. He had expected her to be angry with him, but
before they parted she had seemed to find some excuse for him, and yet
here she was siding against her own son in what he might very well
consider an unnatural way. If Jackson had been at home he would have laid
it to his charge; but he knew that Cynthia would have scorned even to
speak of him with his m