James Monroe Durgin, passed to spirit life this spring. My son will help
me to run the house."

This death could not move Westover more than it had apparently moved the
widow. During the three weeks he had passed under his roof, he had
scarcely exchanged three words with James Monroe Durgin, who remained to
him an impression of large, round, dull-blue eyes, a stubbly upper lip,
and cheeks and chin tagged with coarse, hay-colored beard. The impression
was so largely the impression that he had kept of the dull-blue eyes and
the gaunt, slanted figure of Andrew Jackson Durgin that he could not be
very distinct in his sense of which was now the presence and which the
absence. He remembered, with an effort, that the son's beard was
straw-colored, but he had to make no effort to recall the robust effect
of Mrs. Durgin and her youngest son. He wondered now, as he had often
wondered before, whether she knew of the final violence which had avenged
the boy for the prolonged strain of repression Jeff had inflicted upon
himself during Westover's stay at the farm. After several impulses to go
back and beat him, to follow him to school and expose him to the teacher,
to write to his mother and tell her of his misbehavior, Westover had
decided to do nothing. As he had come off unhurt in person and property,
he could afford to be more generously amused than if he had suffered
damage in either. The more he thought of the incident, the more he was
disposed to be lenient with the boy, whom he was aware of having baffled
and subdued by his superior wit and virtue in perhaps intolerable
measure. He could not quite make out that it was an act of bad faith;
there was no reason to think that the good-natured things the fellow had
done, the constant little offices of zeal and friendliness, were less
sincere than this violent outbreak.

The letter from Lion's Head Farm brought back his three weeks there very