“The woods have crowded back upon it so.  It can’t be more than half its old size.”

“No,” Jeff assented.  He struck his heel against a fragment of the pine bough he had been whittling, and drove it into the soft ground beside the log, and said, without looking up from it:  “I met that woman at a dance last winter.  It wasn’t her dance, but she was running it as if it were, just the way she did with the picnic.  She seemed to want to let bygones be bygones, and I danced with her daughter.  She’s a nice girl.  I thought mother did wrong about that.”  Now he looked at Westover.  “She couldn’t help it, but it wasn’t the thing to do.  A hotel is a public house, and you can’t act as if it wasn’t.  If mother hadn’t known how to keep a hotel so well in other ways, she might have ruined the house by not knowing in a thing like that.  But we’ve got some of the people with us this year that used to come here when we first took farm-boarders; mother don’t know that they’re ever so much nicer, socially, than the people that take the fifty-dollar rooms.”  He laughed, and then he said, seriously:  “If I ever had a son, I don’t believe I should let my pride in him risk doing him mischief.  And if you’ve a mind to let her understand that you believe I’m set against the law for good and all—­”

“I guess I shall not be your ambassador, so far as that.  Why don’t you tell her yourself?”

“She won’t believe me,” said Jeff, with a laugh.  “She thinks I don’t know my mind.  And I don’t like the way we differ when we differ.  We differ more than we mean to.  I don’t pretend to say I’m always right.  She was right about that other picnic—­the one I wanted to make for Mrs. Vostrand.  I suppose,” he ended, unexpectedly, “that you hear from them, now and then?”

“No, I don’t.  I haven’t heard from them for a year; not since—­You knew Genevieve was married?”

“Yes, I knew that,” said Jeff, steadily.

“I don’t quite make it all out.  Mr. Vostrand was very much opposed to it, Mrs. Vostrand told me; but he must have given way at last; and he must have put up the money.”  Jeff looked puzzled, and Westover explained.  “You know the officers in the Italian army—­and all the other armies in Europe, for that matter—­have to deposit a certain sum with the government before they can marry and in the case of Count Grassi, Mr. Vostrand had to furnish the money.”

Jeff said, after a moment:  “Well, she couldn’t help that.”

“No, the girl wasn’t to blame.  I don’t know that any one was to blame.  But I’m afraid our girls wouldn’t marry many titles if their fathers didn’t put up the money.”

“Well, I don’t see why they shouldn’t spend their money that way as well as any other,” said Jeff, and this proof of his impartiality suggested to Westover that he was not only indifferent to the mercenary international marriages, which are a scandal to so many of our casuists, but had quite outlived his passion for the girl concerned in this.