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."

There could be no doubt but what George Lenox had begun better than
other men, with enough to live on comfortably in city or country,
provided he did not think too much of the necessity for showing his wife
that she had not lessened her consequence in marrying him. Nobody could
accuse poor Mr. Lenox now-a-days of ambition, or blame him if, in those
early days as now, that terrible woman had frankly regarded him as an
utter nonentity save in his association with her own destiny. She was a
handsome woman, with aqu