Jeff did not offer to take the plate which she raised to him from where she was kneeling, but looked down at her with perfect intelligence.  “I guess I don’t want anything,” he said, and turned and walked away into the woods.

The ill-advised woman remained kneeling for a moment with her ingratiating smile hardening on her face, while the sense of her blunder petrified the rest.  She was the first to recover herself, and she said, with a laugh that she tried to make reckless, “Well, friends, I suppose the rest of you are hungry; I know I am,” and she began to eat.

The others ate, too, though their appetites might well have been affected by the diplomatic behavior of Whitwell.  He would not take anything, just at present, he said, and got his long length up from the root of a tree where he had folded it down.  “I don’t seem to care much for anything in the middle of the day; breakfast’s my best meal,” and he followed Jeff off into the woods.

“Really,” said the lady, “what did they expect?” But the question was so difficult that no one seemed able to make the simple answer.

The incident darkened the day and spoiled its pleasure; it cast a lessening shadow into the evening when the guests met round the fire in the large, ugly new parlor at the hotel.

The next morning the ladies assembled again on the piazza to decide what should be done with the beautiful day before them.  Whitwell stood at the foot of the flag-staff with one hand staying his person against it, like a figure posed in a photograph to verify proportions in the different features of a prospect.

The heroine of the unhappy affair of the picnic could not forbear authorizing herself to invoke his opinion at a certain point of the debate, and “Mr. Whitwell,” she called to him, “won’t you please come here a moment?”

Whitwell slowly pulled himself across the grass to the group, and at the same moment, as if she had been waiting for him to be present, Mrs. Durgin came out of the office door and advanced toward the ladies.

“Mrs. Marven,” she said, with the stony passivity which the ladies used to note in her when they came over to Lion’s Head Farm in the tally-hos, “the stage leaves here at two o’clock to get the down train at three.  I want you should have your trunks ready to go on the wagon a little before two.”

“You want I should have my—­What do you mean, Mrs. Durgin?”

“I want your rooms.”

“You want my rooms?”

Mrs. Durgin did not answer.  She let her steadfast look suffice; and Mrs. Marven went on in a rising flutter:  “Why, you can’t have my rooms!  I don’t understand you.  I’ve taken my rooms for the whole of August, and they are mine; and—­”

“I have got to have your rooms,” said Mrs. Durgin.

“Very well, then, I won’t give them up,” said the lady.  “A bargain’s a bargain, and I have your agreement—­”

“If you’re not out of your rooms by two o’clock, your things will be put out; and after dinner to-day you will not eat another bite under my roof.”