That same old thrill of feeling goes over me now like a wave as I write. As I stood looking up at him I seemed to grow rich, as if I had suddenly come into my kingdom. I continued to stand leaning against him as he sat down close beside my mother and talked intimately and freely with her. I may have felt a little alien and apart at first, for the days they talked of were the days of long ago, before I could remember. Mr. Floyd's private personal history had been but one short chapter in his long, full and busy life. He was well past thirty before he had married Alice Raymond, the only child of a wealthy merchant: she was but seventeen when he first saw her and fell in love with her. Few people knew whether the twelve short months of his married life were but as a dream to him now, eleven years later, or whether his scant allusions to that time came from a shy tenderness for a memory which was his dearest and most sacred possession. Alice Raymond was but little past eighteen when she died, and even the child she left behind her had never really belonged to Mr. Floyd, but had grown up at her grandfather's at The Headlands while her father had assumed the duties of a mission abroad. Life had denied him little of what men seek as objects in a brilliant and exciting career; but in listening to him now I felt a certainty that he had been a lonely man, and, if not an unhappy one, that his mind was tinged at least with a certain melancholy which lay at the root of all his impulses. My mother seemed to have grown younger in meeting him. She was always the most beautiful of women to me, with her large, serious brown eyes, her wavy brown hair, her complexion pure and delicate as a young girl's; and indeed she was but twenty years older than myself, thus at this date only thirty-four. But while she talked to Mr. Floyd I observed a change in her: her eyes had lost their pensiveness and calm, and fell before his shyly: the flushes came and went on her cheeks. He told her again and again that in meeting her he found the first realization that he had come back to his home: old Mr. Raymond had seemed to be afraid of him, and little Helen had cried with terror when he first clasped her in his arms and kissed her with unguarded fondness. "But that was not strange," observed my mother. "Intimate affection is, after all, a habit. Now that you have a chance of having your little girl always with you, she will very soon grow fond of you." "Oh, but I have no claim to her. She must stay with Mr. Raymond as long as he lives, I suppose. He loved Alice, but he worships Helen. I robbed him of his child once almost against his will, and now that he is so old a man I could not have the heart to do it again." "But she is your own daughter!" cried my mother, half indignantly.