dishes of a festive sort added in recognition of his presence; and there was mince-pie for all.  Mrs. Durgin and Whitwell ate with their knives, and Jombateeste filled himself so soon with every implement at hand that he was able to ask excuse of the others if he left them for the horses before they had half finished.  Frank Whitwell fed with a kind of official or functional conformity to the ways of summer folks; but Cynthia, at whom Westover glanced with anxiety, only drank some tea and ate a little bread and butter.  He was ashamed of his anxiety, for he had owned that it ought not to have mattered if she had used her knife like her father; and it seemed to him as if he had prompted Mrs. Durgin by his curious glance to say:  “We don’t know half the time how the child lives.  Cynthy!  Take something to eat!”

Cynthia pleaded that she was not hungry; Mrs. Durgin declared that she would die if she kept on as she was going; and then the girl escaped to the kitchen on one of the errands which she made from time to time between the stove and the table.

“I presume it’s your coming, Mr. Westover,” Mrs. Durgin went on, with the comfortable superiority of elderly people to all the trials of the young.  “I don’t know why she should make a stranger of you, every time.  You’ve known her pretty much all her life.”

“Ever since you give Jeff what he deserved for scaring her and Frank with his dog,” said Whitwell.

“Poor Fox!” Mrs. Durgin sighed.  “He did have the least sense for a dog I ever saw.  And Jeff used to be so fond of him!  Well, I guess he got tired of him, too, toward the last.”

“He’s gone to the happy hunting-grounds now.  Colorady didn’t agree with him-or old age,” said Whitwell.  “I don’t see why the Injuns wa’n’t right,” he pursued, thoughtfully.  “If they’ve got souls, why ha’n’t their dogs?  I suppose Mr. Westover here would say there wa’n’t any certainty about the Injuns themselves!”

“You know my weak point, Mr. Whitwell,” the painter confessed.  “But I can’t prove they haven’t.”

“Nor dogs, neither, I guess,” said Whitwell, tolerantly.  “It’s curious, though, if animals have got souls, that we ha’n’t ever had any communications from ’em.  You might say that ag’in’ the idea.”

“No, I’ll let you say it,” returned Westover.  “But a good many of the communications seem to come from the lower intelligences, if not the lower animals.”

Whitwell laughed out his delight in the thrust.  “Well, I guess that’s something so.  And them old Egyptian devils, over there, that you say discovered the doctrine of immortality, seemed to think a cat was about as good as a man.  What’s that,” he appealed to Mrs. Durgin, “Jackson said in his last letter about their cat mummies?”

“Well, I guess I’ll finish my supper first,” said Mrs. Durgin, whose nerves Westover would not otherwise have suspected of faintness.  “But Jackson’s letters,” she continued, loyally, “are about the best letters!”