ate
dowager! Just think; less than a year and a half ago we were a doleful
lot, sitting around our ancestral hearth, which was Floyd's, spinsters
in abundance, and a woful lack of the fine gold of life, without which
one is nobody. And here you have two distinguished married daughters,
an interesting widow, a son who will serenely shadow himself under the
wings of a millionnaire, and--well, I can almost forgive Floyd for
marrying that red-haired little nonentity. Who ever supposed she was
going to have such a fortune? And if she should have no children,
Eugene may one day be master of Grandon Park! Who can tell?"

For, after all, Floyd's interests seem hardly identical with their own.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Passion is both raised and softened by confession. In nothing perhaps
were the middle way more desirable than in knowing what to say and what
not to say to those we love.--GOETHE.

All this time Floyd Grandon has scarcely had an hour's leisure. When
the last paper is signed, he draws a long breath of satisfaction. He
has done his whole duty and succeeded better than any sanguine hopes he
has ever dared to entertain. He has settled, so to speak, the lives
that pressed heavily upon him, and they can sustain themselves. He has
come out of it with the honor he prizes so highly. And what else? What
has he saved for himself?

That the distance should widen between himself and Violet was not
strange. He has a horror of a jealous, suspicious husband, and believes
thoroughly in the old adage, that if a woman is good she needs no
watching, and if bad she can outwit Satan himself. But this is no
question of morals. He could trust Violet in any stress of temptation.
She would wrench out her heart and bleed slowly to death before she
would harbor one wrong thought or desire. In that he does her full
justice. She has seen the possibility and turned from it, but nothing
can ever take away the vivid sense, the sweet knowledge that there
might have been a glow in her life instead of a colorless gray sky.

He makes himself accept the bald, hard fact. He will not even trust
himself to long for what is denied, lest he be stirred by some
overmastering impulse as on that one night. She shall not suffer for
what is clearly not her fault. She has no love to give him, nothing but
a calm, grateful liking that almost angers him. That is his portion,
and he will not torment her for any other regard.

They drop into an almost indifferen