She remained to clear away the table, when the rest left it, and Westover followed Mrs. Durgin into the parlor, where she indemnified herself for refraining from any explicit allusion to Jeff before Cynthia.  “The boy,” she explained, when she had made him ransack his memory for every scrap of fact concerning her son, “don’t hardly ever write to me, and I guess he don’t give Cynthy very much news.  I presume he’s workin’ harder than ever this year.  And I’m glad he’s goin’ about a little, from what you say.  I guess he’s got to feelin’ a little better.  It did worry me for him to feel so what you may call meechin’ about folks.  You see anything that made you think he wa’n’t appreciated?”

After Westover got back into his own room, some one knocked at his door, and he found Whitwell outside.  He scarcely asked him to come in, but Whitwell scarcely needed the invitation.  “Got everything you want?  I told Cynthy I’d come up and see after you; Frank won’t be back in time.”  He sat down and put his feet on top of the stove, and struck the heels of his boots on its edge, from the habit of knocking the caked snow off them in that way on stove-tops.  He did not wait to find out that there was no responsive sizzling before he asked, with a long nasal sigh, “Well, how is Jeff gettin’ along?”

He looked across at Westover, who had provisionally seated himself on his bed.

“Why, in the old way.”  Whitwell kept his eye on him, and he added:  “I suppose we don’t any of us change; we develop.”

Whitwell smiled with pleasure in the loosely philosophic suggestion.  “You mean that he’s the same kind of a man that he was a boy?  Well, I guess that’s so.  The question is, what kind of a boy was he?  I’ve been mullin’ over that consid’able since Cynthy and him fixed it up together.  Of course, I know it’s their business, and all that; but I presume I’ve got a right to spee’late about it?”

He referred the point to Westover, who knew an inner earnestness in it, in spite of Whitwell’s habit of outside jocosity.  “Every right in the world, I should say, Mr. Whitwell,” he answered, seriously.

“Well, I’m glad you feel that way,” said Whitwell, with a little apparent surprise.  “I don’t want to meddle, any; but I know what Cynthy is—­I no need to brag her up—­and I don’t feel so over and above certain ’t I know what he is.  He’s a good deal of a mixture, if you want to know how he strikes me.  I don’t mean I don’t like him; I do; the fellow’s got a way with him that makes me kind of like him when I see him.  He’s good-natured and clever; and he’s willin’ to take any amount of trouble for you; but you can’t tell where to have him.”  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?  Seen anything lately that seemed to tally with my idee?”