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"Oh yes. You wouldn't know it had ever been down." "Nor the things it stood for?" "As to that, I can't be so sure." "Well, it's funny," said the philosopher, "how the world seems to always come out at the same hole it went in at!" He paused, with his mouth open, as if to let the notion have full effect with Westover. The painter said: "And you're still in the old place, Mr. Whitwell?"
Westover said, "Thank you," as he dropped on the log, and Whitwell added, relentingly: "I don't suppose a fellow's so much to blame, if he's got the devil in him, as what the devil is." He referred the point with a twinkle of his eyes to Westover, who said: "It's always a question, of course, whether it's the devil. It may be original sin with the fellow himself."
He remained in a constraint from which he presently broke with mocking hilarity when Jombateeste came round the corner of the house, as if he had been waiting for Whitwell to be gone, and told Jeff he must get somebody else to look after the horses. "Why don't you wait and take the horses with you, Jombateeste?" he inquired. "They'll be handing in their resignation, the next thing.
"All right, Cynthia. I'll come down and stay with you. You got everything we want here?" "Yes. And I'll go up and get the breakfast for them in the morning. There won't be much to do." "Dumn 'em! Let 'em get their own breakfast!" said Whitwell, recklessly. "And, father," the girl went on as if he had not spoken, "don't you talk to Mrs. Durgin about it, will you?" "No, no. I sha'n't speak to her.
"Write 'em down in a row and see if we can't pick out some sense. I've had worse finds than this; no vowels at all sometimes; but here's three." He wrote the letters down, while Jackson leaned back against the wall, in patient quiet. "Well, sir," said Whitwell, pushing the paper, where he had written the letters in a line, to Westover, "make anything out of 'em?"
He had expected to be appointed his place by Cynthia Whitwell, but Jeff came to the dining-room with him and showed him to the table he occupied, with an effect of doing him special credit.
Westover denied the appeal for explicit assent in Whitwell's eye, and he went on: "If I'd done that fellow a good turn, in spite of him, or if I'd held him up to something that he allowed was right, and consented to, I should want to keep a sharp lookout that he didn't play me some ugly trick for it. He's a comical devil," Whitwell ended, rather inadequately. "How d's it look to you?
There was something painful in it to him; it had the pathos which perhaps most of the success in the world would reveal if we could penetrate its outside. He was silent, and Whitwell left the point. "Well," he concluded, "what's goin' on in them old European countries?" "Oh, the old thing," said Westover. "But I can't speak for any except France, very well."
"Jeff and his mother made their brags to you?" said Whitwell, with a kind of amiable scorn. "I guess if it wa'n't for Cynthy she wouldn't know where she was standin', half the time. It don't matter where Jeff stands, I guess. Jackson's the best o' the lot, now the old man's gone."
Jombateeste lived with them, and worked in the brick-yards. Out of hours he helped Cynthia, and kept the ugly little place looking trim and neat, and left Whitwell free for the tramps home to nature, which he began to take over the Belmont uplands as soon as the spring opened.
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