Jackson died a week later, and they buried him in the old family lot in the farthest corner of the orchard.  His mother and Cynthia put on mourning for him, and they stood together by his open grave, Mrs. Durgin leaning upon her son’s arm and the girl upon her father’s.  The women wept quietly, but Jeff’s eyes were dry, though his face was discharged of all its prepotent impudence.  Westover, standing across the grave from him, noticed the marks on his forehead that he said were from his scrapping, and wondered what really made them.  He recognized the spot where they were standing as that where the boy had obeyed the law of his nature and revenged the stress put upon him for righteousness.  Over the stone of the nearest grave Jeff had shown a face of triumphant derision when he pelted Westover with apples.  The painter’s mind fell into a chaos of conjecture and misgiving, so that he scarcely took in the words of the composite service which the minister from the Union Chapel at the Huddle read over the dead.

Some of the guests from the hotel came to the funeral, but others who were not in good health remained away, and there was a general sense among them, which imparted itself to Westover, that Jackson’s dying so, at the beginning of the season, was not a fortunate incident.  As he sat talking with Jeff at a corner of the piazza late in the afternoon, Frank Whitwell came up to them and said there were some people in the office who had driven over from another hotel to see about board, but they had heard there was sickness in the house, and wished to talk with him.

“I won’t come,” said Jeff.

“They’re not satisfied with what I’ve said,” the boy urged.  “What shall I tell them?”

“Tell them to-go to the devil,” said Jeff, and when Frank Whitwell made off with this message for delivery in such decent terms as he could imagine for it, Jeff said, rather to himself than to Westover, “I don’t see how we’re going to run this hotel with that old family lot down there in the orchard much longer.”

He assumed the air of full authority at Lion’s Head; and Westover felt the stress of a painful conjecture in regard to the Whitwells intensified upon him from the moment he turned away from Jackson’s grave.

Cynthia and her father had gone back to their own house as soon as Jeff returned, and though the girl came home with Mrs. Durgin after the funeral, and helped her in their common duties through the afternoon and evening, Westover saw her taking her way down the hill with her brother when the long day’s work was over.  Jeff saw her too; he was sitting with Westover at the office door smoking, and he was talking of the Whitwells.

“I suppose they won’t stay,” he said, “and I can’t expect it; but I don’t know what mother will do, exactly.”

At the same moment Whitwell came round the corner of the hotel from the barn, and approached them:  “Jeff, I guess I better tell you straight off that we’re goin’, the children and me.”