“So you live with Jethro Bass,” was Miss Cassandra’s next remark.  “He’s rich enough to take you round the state and give you everything you want.”

“I have everything I want,” replied Cynthia.

“I shouldn’t call living here having everything I wanted,” declared Miss Hopkins, with a contemptuous glance at the tannery house.

“I suppose you wouldn’t,” said Cynthia.

Miss Hopkins was nettled.  She was out of humor that day, besides she shared some of her father’s political ambition.  If he went to Washington, she went too.

“Didn’t you know Jethro Bass was rich?” she demanded, imprudently.  “Why, my father gave twenty thousand dollars to be governor, and Jethro Bass must have got half of it.”

Cynthia’s eyes were of that peculiar gray which, lighted by love or anger, once seen, are never forgotten.  One hand was on the dashboard of the cutter, the other had seized the seat.  Her voice was steady, and the three words she spoke struck Miss Hopkins with startling effect.

Miss Hopkins’s breath was literally taken away, and for once she found no retort.  Let it be said for her that this was a new experience with a new creature.  A demure country girl turn into a wildcat before her very eyes!  Perhaps it was as well for both that the door of the house opened and the Honorable Alva interrupted their talk, and without so much as a glance at Cynthia he got hurriedly into the sleigh and drove off.  When Cynthia turned, the points of color still high in her cheeks and the light still ablaze in her eyes, she surprised Jethro gazing at her from the porch, and some sorrow she felt rather than beheld stopped the confession on her lips.  It would be unworthy of her even to repeat such slander, and the color surged again into her face for very shame of her anger.  Cassandra Hopkins had not been worthy of it.

Jethro did not speak, but slipped his hand into hers, and thus they stood for a long time gazing at the snow fields between the pines on the heights of Coniston.

The next summer, was the first which the painter—­pioneer of summer visitors there—­spent at Coniston.  He was an unsuccessful painter, who became, by a process which he himself does not to-day completely understand, a successful writer of novels.  As a character, however, he himself confesses his inadequacy, and the chief interest in him for the readers of this narrative is that he fell deeply in love with Cynthia Wetherell at nineteen.  It is fair to mention in passing that other young men were in love with Cynthia at this time, notably Eben Hatch—­history repeating itself.  Once, in a moment of madness, Eben confessed his love, the painter never did:  and he has to this day a delicious memory which has made Cynthia the heroine of many of his stories.  He boarded with Chester Perkins, and he was humored by the village as a harmless but amiable lunatic.