“No, no; I can’t say that I have,” said Westover, reluctantly.  He wished to be franker than he now meant to be, but he consulted a scruple that he did not wholly respect; a mere convention it seemed to him, presently.  He said:  “I’ve always felt that charm in him, too, and I’ve seen the other traits, though not so clearly as you seem to have done.  He has a powerful will, yes—­”

He stopped, and Whitwell asked:  “Been up to any deviltry lately?”

“I can’t say he has.  Nothing that I can call intentional.”

“No,” said Whitwell.  “What’s he done, though?”

“Really, Mr. Whitwell, I don’t know that you have any right to expect me to talk him over, when I’m here as his mother’s guest—­his own guest—?”

“No.  I ha’n’t,” said Whitwell.  “What about the father of the girl he’s goin’ to marry?”

Westover could not deny the force of this.  “You’d be anxious if I didn’t tell you what I had in mind, I dare say, more than if I did.”  He told him of Jeff’s behavior with Alan Lynde, and of his talk with him about it.  “And I think he was honest.  It was something that happened, that wasn’t meant.”

Whitwell did not assent directly, somewhat to Westover’s surprise.  He asked:  “Fellow ever done anything to Jeff?”

“Not that I know of.  I don’t know that they ever met before.”

Whitwell kicked his heels on the edge of the stove again.  “Then it might been an accident,” he said, dryly.

Westover had to break the silence that followed, and he found himself defending Jeff, though somehow not for Jeff’s sake.  He urged that if he had the strong will they both recognized in him, he would never commit the errors of a weak man, which were usually the basest.

“How do you know that a strong-willed man a’n’t a weak one?” Whitwell astonished him by asking.  “A’n’t what we call a strong will just a kind of a bull-dog clinch that the dog himself can’t unloose?  I take it a man that has a good will is a strong man.  If Jeff done a right thing against his will, he wouldn’t rest easy till he’d showed that he wa’n’t obliged to, by some mischief worse ’n what he was kept out of.  I tell you, Mr. Westover, if I’d made that fellow toe the mark any way, I’d be afraid of him.”  Whitwell looked at Westover with eyes of significance, if not of confidence.  Then he rose with a prolonged “M—­wel-l-l!  We’re all born, but we a’n’t all buried.  This world is a queer place.  But I guess Jeff ’ll come out right in the end.”

Westover said, “I’m sure he will!” and he shook hands warmly with the father of the girl Jeff was going to marry.

Whitwell came back, after he had got some paces away, and said:  “Of course, this is between you and me, Mr. Westover.”

“Of course!”