When the répertoire was exhausted and silence ensued the blank was presently filled by childish voices and laughter. Marjorie Ashley had begun to lead little Ned Floyd-Rosney about, introducing him to the various passengers disposed on the sofas and rocking-chairs of the saloon. In this scion of the Floyd-Rosney family seemed concentrated all its geniality. He was a whole-souled citizen and not only accepted courtesies with jovial urbanity but himself made advances. He had, indeed, something the tastes of a roisterer, and his father regarded, with open aversion, his disposition to carouse with his fellow-passengers. In his arrogant exclusiveness Floyd-Rosney revolted from the promiscuous attentions lavished on the child. He resented the intimacy which the affable infant had contracted with Marjorie Ashley, the two children rejoicing extremely when the old nurse had been summoned to her breakfast, thus consigning him in the interval to the care of his mother, and rendering him more accessible to the blandishments of his new friend. Floyd-Rosney felt that it was not appropriate that he should be thrust forward in this unseemly publicity thus scantily attended. It was the habit of the family to travel in state, with Floyd-Rosney’s valet, the lady’s maid, a French bonne for the boy, in addition to the old colored nurse in whom Mrs. Floyd-Rosney had such confidence that she would not transfer the child wholly to other tendance. The occasion of this journey, however, did not admit of such a retinue. It was a visit of condolence which they had made to an aunt of Mr. Floyd-Rosney who had lost her son, formerly a very intimate friend of his own. She was an aged lady of limited means and a modest home. To descend upon a household of simple habitudes, already disorganized by recent illness and death, with a troop of strange servants to be cared for and accommodated, was manifestly so inappropriate that even so selfish a man as Floyd-Rosney did not entertain the idea, although his wife received in his querulous asides the full benefit of all the displeasure and inconvenience that he experienced from “having to jaunt about the world with no attendant but the child’s nurse.” The nurse, “Aunt Dorothy,” as in the southern fashion she was respectfully called, had, perhaps, found company at breakfast agreeable to her of her own race and condition, and her absence was prolonged, which fact gave Marjorie Ashley the opportunity to make again the round of the group of passengers in the saloon, cajoling little Ned Floyd-Rosney to show them how he pronounced Miss Dean’s Christian name. At every smiling effort she would burst into gurgles of redundant laughter, so funny did “Miff Milzepar’” for “Miss Hildegarde” sound in her ears. He was conscious of a very humorous effect as he repeatedly made the attempt to pronounce this long word under Marjorie’s urgency, gazing up the while with his big blue eyes