“Wasn't that what you came for?” she asked, by one of the efforts she was making with everything she said. He could have believed he saw the pulse throbbing in her neck. But she held herself stone-still, and he divined her resolution to conquer herself, if she should die for it.
“Yes, I came for that,” said Westover. “That's what makes it so dismaying. If I had only happened on it, I shouldn't have been responsible for the failure I shall make of it.”
She smiled, as if she liked his lightness, but doubted if she ought. “We don't often get Lion's Head clear of snow.”
“Yes; that's another hardship,” said the painter. “Everything is against me! If we don't have a snow overnight, and a cloudy day to-morrow, I shall be in despair.”
She played with the little wheel of the wick; she looked down, and then, with a glance flashed at him, she gasped: “I shall have to take your lamp for the table tea is ready.”
“Oh, well, if you will only take me with it. I'm frightfully hungry.”
Apparently she could not say anything to that. He tried to get the lamp to carry it out for her, but she would not let him. “It isn't heavy,” she said, and hurried out before him.
It was all nothing, but it was all very charming, and Westover was richly content with it; and yet not content, for he felt that the pleasure of it was not truly his, but was a moment of merely borrowed happiness.
The table was laid in the old farm-house sitting-room where he had been served alone when he first came to Lion's Head. But now he sat down with the whole family, even to Jombateeste, who brought in a faint odor of the barn with him.
They had each been in contact with the finer world which revisits nature in the summer-time, and they must all have known something of its usages, but they had reverted in form and substance to the rustic living of their neighbors. They had steak for Westover, and baked potatoes; but for themselves they had such farm fare as Mrs. Durgin had given him the first time he supped there. They made their meal chiefly of doughnuts and tea, and hot biscuit, with some sweet dishes of a festive sort added in recognition of his presence; and there was mince-pie for all. Mrs. Durgin and Whitwell ate with their knives, and Jombateeste filled himself so soon with every implement at hand that he was able to ask excuse of the others if he left them for the horses before they had half finished. Frank Whitwell fed with a kind of official or functional conformity to the ways of summer folks; but Cynthia, at whom Westover glanced with anxiety, only drank some tea and ate a little bread and butter. He was ashamed of his anxiety, for he had owned that it ought not to have mattered if she had used her knife like her father; and it seemed to him as if he had prompted Mrs. Durgin by his curious glance to say: “We don't know half the time how the child lives. Cynthy! Take something to eat!”