His mother said:  “Well, then, that’s all right, and Jeff needn’t do anything for them on that account.  And I’ve made up my mind about one thing:  whatever the hotel does has got to be done for the whole hotel.  It can’t pick and choose amongst the guests.”  Westover liked so little the part of old family friend which he seemed, whether he liked it or not, to bear with the Durgins, that he would gladly have got away now, but Mrs. Durgin detained him with a direct appeal.  “Don’t you think so, Mr. Westover?”

Jeff spared him the pain of a response.  “Very well,” he said to his mother; “I’m not the hotel, and you never want me to be.  I can do this on my own account.”

“Not with my coach and not with my hosses,” said his mother.

Jeff rose.  “I might as well go on down to Cambridge, and get to work on my conditions.”

“Just as you please about that,” said Mrs. Durgin, with the same impassioned quiet that showed in her son’s handsome face and made it one angry red to his yellow hair.  “We’ve got along without you so far, this summer, and I guess we can the rest of the time.  And the sooner you work off your conditions the better, I presume.”

The next morning Jeff came to take leave of him, where Westover had pitched his easel and camp-stool on the slope behind the hotel.

“Why, are you really going?” he asked.  “I was in hopes it might have blown over.”

“No, things don’t blow over so easy with mother,” said Jeff, with an embarrassed laugh, but no resentment.  “She generally means what she says.”

“Well, in this case, Jeff, I think she was right.”

“Oh, I guess so,” said Jeff, pulling up a long blade of grass and taking it between his teeth.  “Anyway, it comes to the same thing as far as I’m concerned.  It’s for her to say what shall be done and what sha’n’t be done in her own house, even if it is a hotel.  That’s what I shall do in mine.  We’re used to these little differences; but we talk it out, and that’s the end of it.  I shouldn’t really go, though, if I didn’t think I ought to get in some work on those conditions before the thing begins regularly.  I should have liked to help here a little, for I’ve had a good time and I ought to be willing to pay for it.  But she’s in good hands.  Jackson’s well—­for him—­and she’s got Cynthia.”

The easy security of tone with which Jeff pronounced the name vexed Westover.  “I suppose your mother would hardly know how to do without her, even if you were at home,” he said, dryly.

“Well, that’s a fact,” Jeff assented, with a laugh for the hit.  “And Jackson thinks the world of her.  I believe he trusts her judgment more than he does mother’s about the hotel.  Well, I must be going.  You don’t know where Mrs. Vostrand is going to be this winter, I suppose?”

“No, I don’t,” said Westover.  He could not help a sort of blind resentment in the situation.  If he could not feel that Jeff was the best that could be for Cynthia, he had certainly no reason to regret that his thoughts could be so lightly turned from her.  But the fact anomalously incensed him as a slight to the girl, who might have been still more sacrificed by Jeff’s constancy.  He forced himself to add:  “I fancy Mrs. Vostrand doesn’t know herself.”