Whitwell found some compensation for the time lost to his study of Boston in the conversation of the painter, which he said was worth a hundred cents on the dollar every time, though it dealt less with the metaphysical aspect of the latest facts of science than the philosopher could have wished.  He did not, to be sure, take very much stock in the picture as it advanced, somewhat fitfully, with a good many reversions to its original state of sketch.  It appeared to him always a slight and feeble representation of Cynthia, though, of course, a native politeness forbade him to express his disappointment.  He avowed a faith in Westover’s ability to get it right in the end, and always bade him go on, and take as much time to it as he wanted.

He felt less uneasy than at first, because he had now found a little furnished house in the woodenest outskirts of North Cambridge, which he hired cheap from the recently widowed owner, and they were keeping house there.  Jombateeste lived with them, and worked in the brick-yards.  Out of hours he helped Cynthia, and kept the ugly little place looking trim and neat, and left Whitwell free for the tramps home to nature, which he began to take over the Belmont uplands as soon as the spring opened.  He was not homesick, as Cynthia was afraid he might be; his mind was fully occupied by the vast and varied interests opened to it by the intellectual and material activities of the neighboring city; and he found ample scope for his physical energies in doing Cynthia’s errands, as well as studying the strange flora of the region.  He apparently thought that he had made a distinct rise and advance in the world.  Sometimes, in the first days of his satisfaction with his establishment, he expressed the wish that Jackson could only have seen how he was fixed, once.  In his preoccupation with other things, he no longer attempted to explore the eternal mysteries with the help of planchette; the ungrateful instrument gathered as much dust as Cynthia would suffer on the what-not in the corner of the solemn parlor; and after two or three visits to the First Spiritual Temple in Boston, he lapsed altogether from an interest in the other world, which had, perhaps, mainly flourished in the absence of pressing subjects of inquiry, in this.

When at last Westover confessed that he had carried his picture of Cynthia as far as he could, Whitwell did his best to hide his disappointment.  “Well, sir,” he said, tolerantly and even cheeringly, “I presume we’re every one of us a different person to whoever looks at us.  They say that no two men see the same star.”

“You mean that she doesn’t look so to you,” suggested the painter, who seemed not at all abashed.

“Well, you might say—­Why, here!  It’s like her; photograph couldn’t get it any better; but it makes me think-well, of a bird that you’ve come on sudden, and it stoops as if it was goin’ to fly—­”

“Ah,” said Westover, “does it make you think of that?”