alled me to her with a timid smile and a faint blush.

"This is my boy, James," she said, looking up at Mr. Floyd smiling, but
with the tears still on her cheeks. "He is your godson, you remember,
and namesake."

"My godson, my namesake, my ward, and my dear friend besides," replied
Mr. Floyd, throwing his arm heavily over my shoulder. "I know him
already very well, and I like him more than I can tell you."

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