“Do you suppose she thinks you and Jeff have made it up again?”

“I don’t know,” said the girl, with a troubled voice, “and I don’t know what to do about it.  It don’t seem as if I could tell her, and yet it’s wrong to let her go on.”

“Why didn’t he tell her?” demanded her father. “‘Ta’n’t fair his leavin’ it to you.  But it’s like him.”

The sick woman’s hold upon the fact weakened most when she was tired.  When she was better, she knew how it was with them.  Commonly it was when Cynthia had got her to bed for the night that she sent for Jeff, and wished to ask him what he was going to do.  “You can’t expect Cynthy to stay here another winter helpin’ you, with Jackson away.  You’ve got to either take her with you, or else come here yourself.  Give up your last year in college, why don’t you?  I don’t want you should stay, and I don’t know who does.  If I was in Cynthia’s place, I’d let you work off your own conditions, now you’ve give up the law.  She’ll kill herself, tryin’ to keep you along.”

Sometimes her speech became so indistinct that no one but Cynthia could make it out; and Jeff, listening with a face as nearly discharged as might be of its laughing irony, had to turn to Cynthia for the word which no one else could catch, and which the stricken woman remained distressfully waiting for her to repeat to him, with her anxious eyes upon the girl’s face.  He was dutifully patient with all his mother’s whims.  He came whenever she sent for him, and sat quiet under the severities with which she visited all his past unworthiness.  “Who you been hectorin’ now, I should like to know,” she began on him one evening when he came at her summons.  “Between you and Fox, I got no peace of my life.  Where is the dog?”

“Fox is all right, mother,” Jeff responded.  “You’re feeling a little better to-night, a’n’t you?”

“I don’t know; I can’t tell,” she returned, with a gleam of intelligence in her eye.  Then she said:  “I don’t see why I’m left to strangers all the time.”

“You don’t call Cynthia a stranger, do you, mother?” he asked, coaxingly.

“Oh—­Cynthy!” said Mrs. Durgin, with a glance as of surprise at seeing her.  “No, Cynthy’s all right.  But where’s Jackson and your father?  If I’ve told them not to be out in the dew once, I’ve told ’em a hundred times.  Cynthy’d better look after her housekeepin’ if she don’t want the whole place to run behind, and not a soul left in the house.  What time o’ year is it now?” she suddenly asked, after a little weary pause.

“It’s the last of August, mother.”

“Oh,” she sighed, “I thought it was the beginnin’ of May.  Didn’t you come up here in May?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then—­Or, mebbe that’s one o’ them tormentin’ dreams; they do pester so!  What did you come for?”

Jeff was sitting on one side of her bed and Cynthia on the other:  She was looking at the sufferer’s face, and she did not meet the glance of amusement which Jeff turned upon her at being so fairly cornered.  “Well, I don’t know,” he said.  “I thought you might like to see me.”