CHAPTER I. ADAM. It was the warmest day of the season, and from the moment when the first robin chirped in the maple tree growing by the door, to the time when the shadows stretching eastward indicated that the sultry afternoon was drawing to a close, Adam Floyd had been busy. Indeed, he could not remember a day when he had worked so continuously and so hard, neither could he recall a time when he had been so perfectly happy, except upon one starlight night when last winter’s snow was piled upon the ground. The events of that night had seemed to him then like a dream, and they were scarcely more real now, when pausing occasionally in his work and leaning his head upon his broad, brown hands, he tried to recall just the awkward words he had spoken and the graceful answer she had given; answer so low that he would hardly have known she was speaking, had not his face been so near to hers that he could hear the murmured response, “I am not half good enough for you, Adam, and shall make a sorry wife; but, if you will take me with all my faults, I am yours.” That was what she had said, the only she in all the world to Adam Floyd, now that the churchyard grass was growing over the poor old blind mother, to whom he had been the tenderest, best of sons, and who had said to him when dying, “I’m glad I’m going home, my boy, for now you can bring Anna here. She is a bonny creature, I know by the sound of her voice and the touch of her silky hair. Tell her how with my last breath I blessed her, and how glad I was to think that when she came, the old blind woman’s chair would be empty, and that she would be spared a heavy burden which she is far too young to bear. God deal by her as she deals by you, my noble boy.”