. With a
basketful of splendid garden roses upon her arm she followed Rosamond
into the great stone pile.

They seemed to have left the sunlight and the summer day itself outside
as they sat waiting in the stiff and formal reception-room, which looked
as if no woman's hand or foot had touched it for a decade. As they were
conducted to Mr. Kendrick's room upon the floor above they noted with
observant eyes the cheerless character of every foot of the way--lofty
hall, sombre staircase, gloomy corridor. Even Mr. Kendrick's own room,
filled though it was with costly furniture, its walls hung with
portraits and heavy oil paintings, after the fashion of the rich man who
wants his home comfortable and attractive but does not know how to make
it so, was by no means homelike.

"This is good of you--this is good of you," the old man said happily, as
they approached his couch. He held out his hands to them, and when
Roberta presented her roses, exclaimed over them like a pleased child,
and sent his man hurrying about to find receptacles for them. He lay
looking from the flowers to the faces while he talked, as if he did not
know which were the more refreshing to his eyes, weary of the
surroundings to which they had been so long accustomed.

"These will be the first thing Dick will spy when he comes to-morrow,"
he prophesied. "I never saw a fellow so fond of roses. The last time he
was down he found time to tell me about somebody's old garden up there
in Eastman, where they have some kind of wonderful, old-fashioned rose
with the sweetest fragrance he ever knew. He had one in his coat; the
sight of it took me back to my boyhood. But he wasn't all roses and
gardens, not a bit of it! I never thought to see him so absorbed in such
a subject as the management of a business. But he's full of it--he's
full of it! You can't imagine how it delights me."

He was full of it himself. Though he more than once apologized for
talking of his grandson and his pleasure in the way "the boy" was
throwing himself into the real merits of the problems presented to the
new firm in Eastman, he kept returning to this fascinating subject. It
was not of interest to himself alone, and though Roberta only listened,
Mrs. Stephen led him on, asking questions which he answered with eager
readiness. But all at once he pulled himself up short.

"Dick would be the first person to hush my garrulous old tongue," said
he. "But I feel like father and mother and gra