My mother kissed me softly on my forehead and went out; and, alas! it was many a day afterward before there was perfect peace and confidence between us again. Not that we were cold or constrained--indeed, we were more than ever gentle and tender in our ways ... but there was a subject which was heavy on our hearts of which we were not again to speak, and there may have been a meaning in my face which she did not venture to read, for I resented it if her look fastened upon me too closely. But the pleasant country-house life went on quite unchecked by events of any sort. Few visitors were admitted, and it was understood at the Point that rigid seclusion from all society was the will of Miss Floyd. The young girl was much talked about: she held every advantage of youth, beauty, enormous wealth, and, almost more than all these, she possessed that prestige which inheres in families that maintain quietly and proudly their reserve, dignity and indifference to the transitory fashions of society. Georgy Lenox became more and more involved in the watering-place dissipations as the season advanced and the hotels filled. She came and went in shimmering toilettes of all hues with an air of radiant enjoyment, but her outgoings and incomings disturbed no one but myself. Helen would kiss her and tell her there was no one half so beautiful; Mr. Floyd would lean back in his chair and smile at her with the admiration in his eyes that all men who are not churls feel it a discourtesy to withhold from a pretty woman; and even my mother, with a conscientious wish to do her duty by the young girl, would inquire carefully about every chaperone, every invitation, and would herself direct what time the carriage should be sent to bring her home. I have already spoken of our pleasant labors together in the study over poor Mr. Raymond's papers. Many a treasure did Mr. Floyd and Helen find there. After the death of his daughter Mr. Raymond had jealously taken possession of every scrap of paper which belonged to her, and now her husband was at last to see a hundred testimonials of her love for him of which he had never dreamed. There was the young girl's journal before she was married, bound in blue velvet and clasped with gold: there were the letters the poor little woman had written, shuddering before her great trial, to the husband and the child who should survive her. I believe all young mothers on the threshold of outward and visible maternity believe they are to die in their agony, but these tokens of his young wife's unspoken dread touched Mr. Floyd so closely we almost had cause to regret that he had seen them. "She never told me of her premonition of death," he said to my mother over and over again. "She seemed very glad and proud that she was going to bring me a little child." Helen had run off with her blue velvet-covered book.