“Do you feel any draught between these windows?” asked Cynthia, abruptly.  “I don’t want you should take cold.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” said Westover.

She went into the rooms on one side of the corridor, and put up their windows, and flung the blinds back.  He did the same on the other side.  He got a peculiar effect of desolation from the mattresses pulled down over the foot of the bedsteads, and the dismantled interiors reflected in the mirrors of the dressing-cases; and he was going to speak of it when he rejoined Cynthia at the stairway leading to the third story, when she said, “Those were Mrs. Vostrand’s rooms I came out of the last.”  She nodded her head over her shoulder toward the floor they were leaving.

“Were they indeed!  And do you remember people’s rooms so long?”

“Yes; I always think of rooms by the name of people that have them, if they’re any way peculiar.”

He thought this bit of uncandor charming, and accepted it as if it were the whole truth.  “And Mrs. Vostrand was certainly peculiar.  Tell me, Cynthia, what did you think of her?”

“She was only here a little while.”

“But you wouldn’t have come to think of her rooms by her name if she hadn’t made a strong impression on you!” She did not answer, and he said, “I see you didn’t like her!”

The girl would not speak, and Mr. Westover went on:  “She used to be very good to me, and I think she used to be better to herself than she is now.”  He knew that Jeff must have told Cynthia of his affair with Genevieve Vostrand, and he kept himself from speaking of her by a resolution he thought creditable, as he mounted the stairs to the upper story in the silence to which Cynthia left his last remark.  At the top she made a little pause in the obscurer light of the close-shuttered corridor, while she said:  “I liked her daughter the best.”

“Yes?” he returned.  “I—­never felt very well acquainted with her, I believe.  One couldn’t get far with her.  Though, for the matter of that, one didn’t get far with Mrs. Vostrand herself.  Did you think Genevieve was much influenced by her mother?”

“She didn’t seem a strong character.”

“No, that was it.  She was what her mother wished her to be.  I’ve often wondered how much she was interested in the marriage she made.”

Cynthia let a rustic silence ensue, and Westover shrank again from the inquisition he longed to make.

It was not Genevieve Vostrand’s marriage which really concerned him, but Cynthia’s engagement, and it was her mind that he would have liked to look into.  It might well be supposed that she regarded it in a perfect matter-of-fact way, and with no ambition beyond it.  She was a country girl, acquainted from childhood with facts of life which town-bred girls would not have known without a blunting of the sensibilities, and why should she be different from other country girls?  She might be as good and as fine as he