she might be going to tell him something more of herself, but she only
said, "Well, any time you want to show me your way of makin' coffee," and
went out of the room.

That evening, which was the close of another flawless day, he sat again
watching the light outside, when he saw her come into the hallway with a
large shade-lamp in her hand. She stopped at the door of a room he had
not seen yet, and looked out at him to ask:

"Won't you come in and set in the parlor if you want to?"

He found her there when he came in, and her two sons with her; the
younger was sleepily putting away some school-books, and the elder seemed
to have been helping him with his lessons.

"He's got to begin school next week," she said to Westover; and at the
preparations the other now began to make with a piece of paper and a
planchette which he had on the table before him, she asked, in the
half-mocking, half-deprecating way which seemed characteristic of her:
"You believe any in that?"

"I don't know that I've ever seen it work," said the painter.

"Well, sometimes it won't work," she returned, altogether mockingly now,
and sat holding her shapely hands, which were neither so large nor so
rough as they might have been, across her middle and watching her son
while the machine pushed about under his palm, and he bent his wan eyes
upon one of the oval-framed photographs on the wall, as if rapt in a
supernal vision. The boy stared drowsily at the planchette, jerking this
way and that, and making abrupt starts and stops. At last the young man