Mr. Floyd sent for me at once when he had read the news. I found him lying on a sofa in his great dingy parlor, with its heavily-moulded ceilings frescoed into dusky richness, its sides hung with heavy crimson draperies and decaying canvases, out of whose once splendid pigments color and meaning had faded long ago. "Think of it, my boy," said he softly: "my father-in-law is dead. Mr. Raymond died the twenty-second of April." "Poor little Helen!" I exclaimed: "is she all alone?" "I fancy your mother is with her," he returned, glancing back at the letter. "She says she shall send for Mrs. Randolph. She and I are executors of the old man's will. I try to feel solemn over the death," he went on gravely. "With all our belief in immortality, death is a terrible thing to regard closely. But yet he was an old, old man: am I wrong that I cannot mourn for him?" We went about our preparations for return at once. Vanished were our plans for Venice and the Alps. I had looked forward with pleasure to spending my summer with Dart. No man in the world is so good a comrade as an enthusiastic painter, and Harry was keen of eye, with an exquisite pleasure in form and color: nothing came amiss to him between earth and sky. It had been a pleasant dream with us to go together about Venice, rowed by some sweet-voiced Luigi or Antonio from one stretch of sea-kissed marble palace-steps to another--to spend our mornings in dim basilicas, our afternoons away across the widening lagoons, and finish the day in the square of San Marco listening to Bellini's and Verdi's airs. But now that this sweet idleness of Italy must be put by, I was glad that we were to come back home again. I was a little surprised to find myself almost as eager as Mr. Floyd in making preparations for return. In a week we were on the ocean. Mr. Floyd had seemed to enjoy our travels. He was always in good spirits, always a brilliant and engaging talker, a pleased observer and clever analyst. Harry and I had made the usual display of unlimited fastidiousness which youth delights in, but our elder had taken everything more kindly. He could not fatigue himself, and rarely looked at more than two or three pictures at a time. "I used to feel," he would say, "if I went away from a gallery without a crick in my back and a blinding headache that I had no realization of my æsthetic privileges. Now-a-days I am willing to confess that I find too much of everything. Besides, all these pictures have been so overpraised! Let us find some pleasure that is not in the guide-books." This was his tone, and I discovered in it at times, despite all his cheerfulness, a strange fatigue of spirit. But now that he was on his way home he had suddenly become exuberantly joyful.