Mr. Floyd's visits became more and more frequent as the summer advanced, and I began with some jealousy to notice a growing change in my mother. In former times she had shown an exquisite poise of strength and peace in every phase of her life, but of late she seemed possessed with a sort of girlish fluttering and disquiet: her eyes were dreamy and her voice softer and less decided in its inflexions, and her manner to me, instead of continuing its old noble habits of command, became timid and caressing, as if she were anxious to propitiate me. In the evenings, instead of sitting among us boys on the piazza, she would leave us and walk by herself under the laburnums in the garden; and if I followed her and put my arm about her, I found, with vague pain and rebellion at my heart, that although she amply responded to my tenderness, she had sweet and sacred thoughts that she was smiling over all by herself. It had been her wont to busy herself with housekeeping cares from morning until night: our income was small, and she was very busy, for she gave thought to everything and decided wisely upon the smallest matter. In these duties she had found pleasant occupation apparently: she had shown no fatigue, had marred nothing by impatience or over-haste--had judiciously studied how to manage every detail of our lives. Now all at once there seemed a little lassitude upon her: she left all questions concerning the housekeeping for her domestic, Ann, to decide; she would drop her sewing in her lap and fall into reverie, her cheeks crimsoning, her eyes growing dark and misty, and emerge into reality presently with a beautiful trembling smile on her lips. I grudged her those reveries and those smiles: I quaked at the thought that her heart was turning toward Mr. Floyd, much as I loved and venerated him. I knew that she had worshipped my father, and I wanted her to carry that one feeling supreme to the end of her days. _Cet age est sans pitie_. I realized nothing of the preciousness of those impulses which were quickening her again into happy youth: I realized nothing of her having been lonely--nothing of the pain and passion of longing which must have tried her through these eight years of widowhood, without any companionship save mine, with such cruel silence when she had been used to every tenderness, to constant loving flatteries, to gentlest ministrations--or I hope I should not so bitterly have resented this new hope of hers which made her almost afraid to look me in the face. When Mr. Floyd did not come he wrote frequently to my mother. I used to bring his letters to her with a swelling heart and bitter tears in my eyes; but she knew nothing of those tears, for she never looked up, nor when she took the letters did she read them before me. He wrote frequently to me as well as to her, but while her envelopes covered numerous well-filled pages, his notes to me were adorned with just one degree more ample verbiage than we use in a telegram.