“Do you suppose,” asked Jeff, with cheerful cynicism, “that it was the first time she was civil to a man her brother got drunk with?”

“No!  But all the more you ought to have considered her helplessness.  It ought to have made her the more sacred”—­Jeff gave an exasperating shrug—­“to you, and you ought to have kept away from her for decency’s sake.”

“I was engaged to dance with her.”

“I can’t allow you to be trivial with me, Durgin,” said Westover.  “You’ve acted like a blackguard, and worse, if there is anything worse.”

Jeff stood at a corner of the fire, leaning one elbow on the mantel, and he now looked thoughtfully down on Westover, who had sunk weakly into a chair before the hearth.  “I don’t deny it from your point of view, Mr. Westover,” he said, without the least resentment in his tone.  “You believe that everything is done from a purpose, or that a thing is intended because it’s done.  But I see that most things in this world are not thought about, and not intended.  They happen, just as much as the other things that we call accidents.”

“Yes,” said Westover, “but the wrong things don’t happen from people who are in the habit of meaning the right ones.”

“I believe they do, fully half the time,” Jeff returned; “and, as far as the grand result is concerned, you might as well think them and intend them as not.  I don’t mean that you ought to do it; that’s another thing, and if I had tried to get Lynde drunk, and then gone to dance with his sister, I should have been what you say I am.  But I saw him getting worse without meaning to make him so; and I went back to her because—­I wanted to.”

“And you think, I suppose,” said Westover, “that she wouldn’t have cared any more than you cared if she had known what you did.”

“I can’t say anything about that.”

The painter continued, bitterly:  “You used to come in here, the first year, with notions of society women that would have disgraced a Goth, or a gorilla.  Did you form your estimate of Miss Lynde from those premises?”

“I’m not a boy now,” Jeff answered, “and I haven’t stayed all the kinds of a fool I was.”

“Then you don’t think Miss Lynde would speak to you, or look at you, after she knew what you had done?”

“I should like to tell her and see,” said Jeff, with a hardy laugh.  “But I guess I sha’n’t have the chance.  I’ve never been a favorite in society, and I don’t expect to meet her again.”

“Perhaps you’d like to have me tell her?”

“Why, yes, I believe I should, if you could tell me what she thought—­not what she said about it.”

“You are a brute,” answered Westover, with a puzzled air.  What puzzled him most and pleased him least was the fellow’s patience under his severity, which he seemed either not to feel or not to mind.  It was of a piece with the behavior of the rascally boy whom he had cuffed for frightening Cynthia and her little brother long ago, and he wondered what final malevolence it portended.