rfect leisure as a rule, and with amiable, courteous ways press upon
all acquaintances an incessant hospitality; and Thorpe, always
frivolous, had at once fallen into the general way. Here at The
Headlands the house was still under the shadow of deep mourning, but his
old acquaintance with Mr. Floyd and my mother made his frequent visits
admissible. At any rate, beyond Mr. Floyd's unobtrusive sarcasm at his
expense, I heard no objections to Thorpe's dropping in to breakfast.
Mills brought him a plate, and he himself chose a seat at Helen's left
hand, and devoted himself to her service in a way that I knew bored her
immeasurably. He sugared her strawberries and creamed them generously,
and she sent them to her parrot. "I will take some more strawberries,
Mills," she said then, and treated Thorpe's further attempts to serve
her with chilly disdain.

"Now that Floyd is here," said Mr. Floyd when we were through breakfast,
"I shall indulge in laziness no longer, but shall sit by and see him
work." And the result was that for the next two weeks he and my mother,
Helen and I, all sat in Mr. Raymond's study for an hour or two every
morning and looked over his papers. Two or three times Mr. Wickham the
lawyer came from New York, and it was easy enough to see that Helen's
property was so large, its investments so various, that its proper care
was work enough for one man.

"I shall look about for a husband for her at once," Mr. Floyd said half
a dozen times to the lawyer when we three men were alone: "nobody can
expect me to waste my few energies in looking after all these
interests."

"Depend upon it, sir," Mr. Wickham would return with an easy chuckle,
"you will find the world full of young men who will be happy to relieve
you of every responsibility regarding Miss Floyd's fortune."

"They shall none of them have her," her father exclaimed once,
fiercely--"not one! No man but one who loves her for her sweet self
alone shall ever have my little girl." At such times Mr. Wickham always
looked at me with a critical curiosity which I could forgive in so old a
friend of Helen's, but which at the same time robbed me of a certain
composure I should have liked to carry through the difficulties of my
present position. For I was, in truth, performing all the duties of an
executor and mastering the details of the schedule of property, while
Mr. Floyd sat by and made jokes upon the way Helen would spend her
income.

"Hair-pins cost a