These gentle sights and sounds and odors blended in the influence which Jeff’s spirit felt more and more.  He realized that he was a blot on the loveliness of the morning.  He had a longing to make atonement and to win forgiveness.  His heart was humbled toward Cynthia, and he went wondering how his mother would make it out with her, and how, if she won him any advantage, he should avail himself of it and regain the girl’s trust; he had no doubt of her love.  He perceived that there was nothing for him hereafter but the most perfect constancy of thought and deed, and he desired nothing better.

At a turn of his road where it branched toward the Huddle a group of young girls stood joking and laughing; before Jeff came up with them they separated, and all but one continued on the way beyond the turning.  She came toward Jeff, who gayly recognized her as she drew near.

She blushed and bridled at his bow and at his beauty and splendor, and in her embarrassment pertly said that she did not suppose he would have remembered her.  She was very young, but at fifteen a country girl is not so young as her town sister at eighteen in the ways of the other sex.

Jeff answered that he should have known her anywhere, in spite of her looking so much older than she did in the summer when she had come with berries to the hotel.  He said she must be feeling herself quite a young lady now, in her long dresses, and he praised the dress which she had on.  He said it became her style; and he found such relief from his heavy thoughts in these harmless pleasantries that he kept on with them.  He had involuntarily turned with her to walk back to her house on the way he had come, and he asked her if he might not carry her catkins for her.  She had a sheaf of them in the hollow of her slender arm, which seemed to him very pretty, and after a little struggle she yielded them to him.  The struggle gave him still greater relief from his self-reproach, and at her gate he begged her to let him keep one switch of the pussywillows, and he stood a moment wondering whether he might not ask her for something else.  She chose one from the bundle, and drew it lightly across his face before she put it in his hand.  “You may have this for Cynthy,” she said, and she ran laughingly up the pathway to her door.

XLVI

Cynthia did not appear at dinner, and Jeff asked his mother when he saw her alone if she had spoken to the girl.  “Yes, but she said she did not want to talk yet.”

“All right,” he returned.  “I’m going to take a nap; I believe I feel as if I hadn’t slept for a month.”

He slept the greater part of the afternoon, and came down rather dull to the early tea.  Cynthia was absent again, and his mother was silent and wore a troubled look.  Whitwell was full of a novel conception of the agency of hypnotism in interpreting the life of the soul as it is intimated in dreams.  He had been reading a book that affirmed the consubstantiality of the sleep-dream and the hypnotic illusion.  He wanted to know if Jeff, down at Boston, had seen anything of the hypnotic doings that would throw light on this theory.