The little man roused himself from the muse in which he was listening and smoking.  “Me, I’m Frantsh,” he said.

“Yes, that’s what Jeff was sayin’,” said Whitwell.  “I meant France.”

“Oh,” answered Jombateeste, impatiently, “I thought you mean the Hunited State.”

“Well, not this time,” said Whitwell, amid the general laughter.

“Good for Jombateeste,” said Jeff.  “Stand up for Canada every time, John.  It’s the livest country, in the world three months of the year, and the ice keeps it perfectly sweet the other nine.”

Whitwell could not brook a diversion from the high and serious inquiry they had entered upon.  “It must have made this country look pretty slim when you got back.  How’d New York look, after Paris?”

“Like a pigpen,” said Jeff.  He left his chair and walked round the table toward a door opening into the adjoining room.  For the first time Westover noticed a figure in white seated there, and apparently rapt in the talk which had been going on.  At the approach of Jeff, and before he could have made himself seen at the doorway, a tremor seemed to pass over the figure; it fluttered to its feet, and then it vanished into the farther dark of the room.  When Jeff disappeared within, there was a sound of rustling skirts and skurrying feet and the crash of a closing door, and then the free rise of laughing voices without.  After a discreet interval, Westover said:  “Mr. Whitwell, I must say good-night.  I’ve got another day’s work before me.  It’s been a most interesting evening.”

“You must try it again,” said Whitwell, hospitably.  “We ha’n’t got to the bottom of that broken shaft yet.  You’ll see ’t plantchette ’ll have something more to say about it:  Heigh, Jackson?” He rose to receive Westover’s goodnight; the others nodded to him.

As the painter climbed the hill to the hotel he saw two figures on the road below; the one in white drapery looked severed by a dark line slanting across it at the waist.  In the country, he knew, such an appearance might mark the earliest stages of love-making, or mere youthful tenderness, in which there was nothing more implied or expected.  But whatever the fact was, Westover felt a vague distaste for it, which, as it related itself to a more serious possibility, deepened to something like pain.  It was probable that it should come to this between those two, but Westover rebelled against the event with a sense of its unfitness for which he could not give himself any valid reason; and in the end he accused himself of being a fool.

Two ladies sat on the veranda of the hotel and watched a cloud-wreath trying to lift itself from the summit of Lion’s Head.  In the effort it thinned away to transparency in places; in others, it tore its frail texture asunder and let parts of the mountain show through; then the fragments knitted themselves loosely together, and the vapor lay again in dreamy quiescence.