“Did it get into the papers?”

“Mm.”  Mrs. Durgin nodded.  “And some dirty, sneakin’ thing, here, wrote a letter to the paper and told a passel o’ lies about Jeff and all of us; and the paper printed Jeff’s picture with it; I don’t know how they got a hold of it.  So when he got that chance to go, I just said, ‘Go.’  You’ll see he’ll keep all straight enough after this, Mr. Westover.”

“Old woman read you any of Jeff’s letters?” Whit-well asked, when his chance for private conference with Westover came.  “What was the rights of that scrape he got into?”

Westover explained as favorably to Jeff as he could; the worst of the affair was the bad company he was in.

Well, where there’s smoke there’s some fire.  Cou’t discharged him and college suspended him.  That’s about where it is?  I guess he’ll keep out o’ harm’s way next time.  Read you what he said about them scenes of the Revolution in Paris?”

“Yes; he seems to have looked it all up pretty thoroughly.”

“Done it for me, I guess, much as anything.  I was always talkin’ it up with him.  Jeff’s kep’ his eyes open, that’s a fact.  He’s got a head on him, more’n I ever thought.”

Westover decided that Mrs. Durgin’s prepotent behavior toward Mrs. Marven the summer before had not hurt her materially, with the witnesses even.  There were many new boarders, but most of those whom he had already met were again at Lion’s Head.  They said there was no air like it, and no place so comfortable.  If they had sold their birthright for a mess of pottage, Westover had to confess that the pottage was very good.  Instead of the Irish woman at ten dollars a week who had hitherto been Mrs. Durgin’s cook, under her personal surveillance and direction, she had now a man cook, whom she boldly called a chef and paid eighty dollars a month.  He wore the white apron and white cap of his calling, but Westover heard him speak Yankee through his nose to one of the stablemen as they exchanged hilarities across the space between the basement and the barn-door.  “Yes,” Mrs. Durgin admitted, “he’s an American; and he learnt his trade at one of the best hotels in Portland.  He’s pretty headstrong, but I guess he does what he’s told—­in the end.  The meanyous?  Oh, Franky Whitwell prints then.  He’s got an amateur printing-office in the stable-loft.”

XIV.

One morning toward the end of August, Whitwell, who was starting homeward, after leaving his ladies, burdened with their wishes and charges for the morrow, met Westover coming up the hill with his painting-gear in his hand.  “Say!” he hailed him.  “Why don’t you come down to the house to-night?  Jackson’s goin’ to come, and, if you ha’n’t seen him work the plantchette for a spell, you’ll be surprised.  There a’n’t hardly anybody he can’t have up.  You’ll come?  Good enough!”