looks gay!  He don’t spend his winters at Lion’s Head:  he is off to Europe about as soon as the house closes in the fall, and he keeps bringin’ home new dodges.  Guess you couldn’t get no boa’d there for no seven dollars a week now!  I tell you, Jeff’s the gentleman now, and his wife’s about the nicest lady I ever saw.  Do’ know as I care so much about her mother; do’ know as I got anything ag’inst her, either, very much.  But that little girl, Beechy, as they call her, she’s a beauty!  And round with Jeff all the while!  He seems full as fond of her as her own mother does, and that devil, that couldn’t seem to get enough of tormentin’ little children when he was a boy, is as good and gentle with that little thing as-pie!”

Whitwell seemed to have come to an end of his celebration of Jeff’s success, and Westover asked: 

“And what do you make now, of planchette’s brokenshaft business?  Or don’t you believe in planchette any more?”

Whitwell’s beaming face clouded.  “Well, sir, that’s a thing that’s always puzzled me.  If it wa’n’t that it was Jackson workin’ plantchette that night, I shouldn’t placed much dependence on what she said; but Jackson could get the truth out of her, if anybody could.  Sence I b’en up there I b’en figurin’ it out like this:  the broken shaft is the old Jeff that he’s left off bein’—­”

Whitwell stopped midway in his suggestion, with an inquiring eye on the painter, who asked:  “You think he’s left off being the old Jeff?”

“Well, sir, you got me there,” the philosopher confessed.  “I didn’t see anything to the contrary, but come to think of it—­”

“Why couldn’t the broken shaft be his unfulfilled destiny on the old lines?  What reason is there to believe he isn’t what he’s always been?”

“Well, come to think of it—­”

“People don’t change in a day, or a year,” Westover went on, “or two or three years, even.  Sometimes I doubt if they ever change.”

“Well, all that I thought,” Whitwell urged, faintly, against the hard scepticism of a man ordinarily so yielding, “is ’t there must be a moral government of the universe somewheres, and if a bad feller is to get along and prosper hand over hand, that way, don’t it look kind of as if—­”

“There wasn’t any moral government of the universe?  Not the way I see it,” said Westover.  “A tree brings forth of its kind.  As a man sows he reaps.  It’s dead sure, pitilessly sure.  Jeff Durgin sowed success, in a certain way, and he’s reaping it.  He once said to me, when I tried to waken his conscience, that he should get where he was trying to go if he was strong enough, and being good had nothing to do with it.  I believe now he was right.  But he was wrong too, as such a man always is.  That kind of tree bears Dead Sea apples, after all.  He sowed evil, and he must reap evil.  He may never know it, but he will reap what he has sown.  The dreadful thing is that others must share in his harvest.  What do you think?”