“I declare,” Whitwell went on, musingly, “I wisht Mr. Westover was here.”

Cynthia started, but it was to ask:  “Do you want I should help you with your Latin, Frank?”

Whitwell came back an hour later and found them still at their books.  He told them it was all arranged; Durgin was to give up the place to him in a week, and he was to surrender it again when Jeff came back in the spring.  In the mean time things were to remain as they were; after he was gone, they could all go and live at Lion’s Head if they chose.

“We’ll see,” said Cynthia.  “I’ve been thinking that might be the best way, after all.  I might not get a school, it’s so late.”

“That’s so,” her father assented.  “I declare,” he added, after a moment’s muse, “I felt sorry for the feller settin’ up there alone, with nobody to do for him but that old thing he’s got in.  She can’t cook any more than—­” He desisted for want of a comparison, and said:  “Such a lookin’ table, too.”

“Do you think I better go and look after things a little?” Cynthia asked.

“Well, you no need to,” said her father.  He got down the planchette, and labored with it, while his children returned to Frank’s lessons.

“Dumn ’f I can make the thing work,” he said to himself at last.  “I can’t git any of ’em up.  If Jackson was here, now!”

Thrice a day Cynthia went up to the hotel and oversaw the preparation of Jeff’s meals and kept taut the slack housekeeping of the old Irish woman who had remained as a favor, after the hotel closed, and professed to have lost the chance of a place for the winter by her complaisance.  She submitted to Cynthia’s authority, and tried to make interest for an indefinite stay by sudden zeal and industry, and the last days of Jeff in the hotel were more comfortable than he openly recognized.  He left the care of the building wholly to Whitwell, and shut himself up in the old farm parlor with the plans for a new hotel which he said he meant to put up some day, if he could ever get rid of the old one.  He went once to Lovewell, where he renewed the insurance, and somewhat increased it; and he put a small mortgage on the property.  He forestalled the slow progress of the knowledge of others’ affairs, which, in the country, is as sure as it is slow, and told Whitwell what he had done.  He said he wanted the mortgage money for his journey, and the insurance money, if he could have the luck to cash up by a good fire, to rebuild with.

Cynthia seldom met him in her comings and goings, but if they met they spoke on the terms of their boy and girl associations, and with no approach through resentment or tenderness to the relation that was ended between them.  She saw him oftener than at any other time setting off on the long tramps he took through the woods in the afternoons.  He was always alone, and, so far as any one knew, his wanderings had no object but to kill the time which hung heavy on his hands during the fortnight after his mother’s death, before he sailed.  It might have seemed strange that he should prefer to pass the days at Lion’s Head after he had arranged for the care of the place with Whitwell, and Whitwell always believed that he stayed in the hope of somehow making up with Cynthia.