Had he given up the fight?  Cynthia fervently hoped and prayed that he had, but she hoped and prayed in silence.  Well she knew, if the event in the tannery shed had not made him abandon his affairs, no appeal could do so.  Her happiest days in this period were the Saturdays and Sundays spent with him in Coniston, and as the weeks went by she began to believe that the change, miraculous as it seemed, had indeed taken place.  He had given up his power.  It was a pleasure that made the weeks bearable for her.  What did it matter—­whether he had made the sacrifice for the sake of his love for her?  He had made it.

On these Saturdays and Sundays they went on long drives together over the hills, while she talked to him of her life in Brampton or the books she was reading, and of those she had chosen for him to read.  Sometimes they did not turn homeward until the delicate tracery of the branches on the snow warned them of the rising moon.  Jethro was often silent for hours at a time, but it seemed to Cynthia that it was the silence of peace—­of a peace he had never known before.  There came no newspapers to the tannery house now:  during the mid-week he read the books of which she had spoken William Wetherell’s books; or sat in thought, counting, perhaps; the days until she should come again.  And the boy of those days for him was more pathetic than much that is known to the world as sorrow.

And what did Coniston think?  Coniston, indeed, knew not what to think, when, little by little, the great men ceased to drive up to the door of the tannery house, and presently came no more.  Coniston sank then from its proud position as the real capital of the state to a lonely hamlet among the hills.  Coniston, too, was watching the drama, and had had a better view of the stage than Brampton, and saw some reason presently for the change in Jethro Bass.  Not that Mr. Satterlee told, but such evidence was bound, in the end, to speak for itself.  The Newcastle Guardian had been read and debated at the store—­debated with some heat by Chester Perkins and other mortgagors; discussed, nevertheless, in a political rather than a moral light.  Then Cynthia had returned home; her face had awed them by its sorrow, and she had begun to earn her own living.  Then the politicians had ceased to come.  The credit belongs to Rias Richardson for hawing been the first to piece these three facts together, causing him to burn his hand so severely on the stove that he had to carry it bandaged in soda for a week.  Cynthia Wetherell had reformed Jethro.

Though the village loved and revered Cynthia, Coniston as a whole did not rejoice in that reform.  The town had fallen from its mighty estate, and there were certain envious ones who whispered that it had remained for a young girl who had learned city ways to twist Jethro around her finger; that she had made him abandon his fight with Isaac D. Worthington because Mr. Worthington had a son—­but there is no use writing such scandal.  Stripped of his power—­even though he stripped himself—­Jethro began to lose their respect, a trait tending to prove that the human race may have had wolves for ancestors as well as apes.  People had small opportunity, however, of showing a lack of respect to his person, for in these days he noticed no one and spoke to none.