"No wonder. I have been in Europe eight years. My little girl is ten years old, and had never seen me since she was the merest baby. She was afraid of me at first." But not for long, I was sure of that: nobody, man, woman or child, could look into his face and not love and trust him. "I want to see your mother," he exclaimed with a sudden flash of expression over his tranquil face. "Your mother is all that is left to me of my youth: I have come back an old man." I laughed at this, and then we fell to talking of our life in Belfield. I was not a loquacious fellow, but something about Mr. Floyd unloosed my tongue, and after describing our quiet household ways I spoke freely of the Lenoxes and of Jack and Harry. The two boys were cousins, and Harry, having neither father nor mother, lived with the Holts, who were the rich people of our village. My two friends loved me dearly, but still they were more to each other than I could be to either, for they shared the same room, ate at the same table, and had grown into an intimacy wonderful and rare even among brothers. They were Damon and Pythias, Orestes and Pylades; but indeed I doubted if anything in poetry, history or tradition had ever equalled this beautiful and complete friendship. I could not be jealous of it, because each gave me all I needed; and even if, at times, I felt the pang of being a little outside their world, my isolation was made sacred to me by the recollection of the brother I had lost, in whom some time, somewhere, I should regain everything. Mr. Floyd had a way of listening which made me yearn to tell him every insignificant detail of my life. I knew that he was a man of national reputation, but I hardly cared for that, since he was the pleasantest companion I had ever met. I found myself gossiping to him about our village worthies, making him laugh heartily at their sayings passed into tradition and fable among us boys; for our one-eyed shoemaker and our corpulent grocer, like many other country wits to fortune and to fame unknown, surpassed either Douglas Jerrold or Sydney Smith in quip and drollery. And I did not omit George Lenox, for all Belfield except his wife was in the secret of his affairs, and they were our crowning joke, in which poor George himself joined merrily, although the story was so against himself. "That girl of his is remarkably pretty," said Mr. Floyd. "Is he, then, so poor? He was well born, liberally educated, and married in a family of high pretensions."