n was rainy and cold
for the season, the storm extending as far westward as the city of New
York, and making Wilford Cameron shiver as he stepped from the Hudson
River cars into the carriage waiting for him, first greeting pleasantly
the white-gloved driver, who, carefully closing the carriage door,
mounted to his seat and drove his handsome bays in the direction of
No. ---- Fifth Avenue. And Wilford, leaning back among the yielding
cushions, thought how pleasant it was to be going home again, feeling
glad, as he frequently did, that the home to which he was going was in
every particular unexceptionable. The Camerons he knew were an old and
highly respectable family, while it was his mother's pride that, go back
as far as one might on either side, there could not be found a single
blemish or a member of whom to be ashamed. On the Cameron side there were
millionaires, merchant princes, bankers and stockholders, professors and
scholars, while on hers, the Rossiter side, there were LL.D.'s and
D.D.'s, lawyers and clergymen, authors and artists, beauties and belles,
the whole forming an illustrious line of ancestry, admirably represented
and sustained by the present family of Camerons, occupying the
brownstone front, corner of ---- Street and Fifth Avenue, where the
handsome carriage stopped and a tall figure ran quickly up the marble
steps. There was a soft rustle of silk, an odor of delicate perfume,
and from the luxurious chair before the fire kindled in the grate an
elderly lady arose and advanced a step or two toward the parlor door. In
another moment she was kissing the young man bending over her and
saluting her as mother, kissing him quietly, properly, as the Camerons
always kissed. She was very glad to have Wilford home again, for he was
her favorite child, and brushing the raindrops from his coat she led him
to the fire, offering him her own easy-chair and starting herself in
quest of another. But Wilford held her back, and making her sit down, he
drew an ottoman beside her and then asked her first how she had been and
then how Jamie was, then where his sisters were, and if his father had
come home--for there was a father, the elder Cameron, a quiet,
unassuming man, who stayed all day in Wall Street, seldom coming home in
time to carve at his own dinner table, and when he was at home, asking
for nothing except to be left by his fashionable wife and daughters to
himself, free to smoke and doze over his evening paper