The girl broke into tears and went out of the room. She sent in the night-watcher, and then Jeff took leave of his mother with an unwonted kiss.
Into the shadow of a starlit night he saw the figure he had been waiting for glide out of the glitter of the hotel lights. He followed it down the road.
“Cynthia!” he called; and when he came up with her he asked: “What's the reason we can't make it true? Why can't you believe what mother wants me to make you?”
Cynthia stopped, as her wont was when she wished to speak seriously. “Do you ask that for my sake or hers?”
“For both your sakes.”
“I thought so. You ought to have asked it for your own sake, Jeff, and then I might have been fool enough to believe you. But now—”
She started swiftly down the hill again, and this time he did not try to follow her.
L.
Mrs. Durgin's speech never regained the measure of clearness it had before; no one but Cynthia could understand her, and often she could not. The doctor from Lovewell surmised that she had sustained another stroke, lighter, more obscure than the first, and it was that which had rendered her almost inarticulate. The paralysis might have also affected her brain, and silenced her thoughts as well as her words. Either she believed that the reconciliation between Jeff and Cynthia had taken place, or else she could no longer care. She did not question them again, but peacefully weakened more and more. Near the end of September she had a third stroke, and from this she died.