r love for him of
which he had never dreamed. There was the young girl's journal before
she was married, bound in blue velvet and clasped with gold: there were
the letters the poor little woman had written, shuddering before her
great trial, to the husband and the child who should survive her. I
believe all young mothers on the threshold of outward and visible
maternity believe they are to die in their agony, but these tokens of
his young wife's unspoken dread touched Mr. Floyd so closely we almost
had cause to regret that he had seen them.

"She never told me of her premonition of death," he said to my mother
over and over again. "She seemed very glad and proud that she was going
to bring me a little child."

Helen had run off with her blue velvet-covered book.

"Some time," said Mr. Floyd, "I want to read every word she wrote, but
these letters are enough now: I can bear nothing more." And even these
he could not well endure until my mother had talked them over with him
again and again.

The quiet, happy life which we led in these days suited Mr. Floyd's
health, and there was no recurrence of the alarming symptoms which had
filled me with dread a few months before. "I begin to think," he
remarked often, "that by continuing this life, as simple as that which a
bird leads flying from bough to bough, I am to grow stout and elderly,
and go on getting gray, rubicund, with an amplitude of white waistcoat,
until I am seventy years of age or so. My father and mother each died
young, but both by accident as it were: the habit of both families was
of long life and great strength. I confess I should like to live for a
good many years yet. I suppose Helen will marry by and by. I should like
to be a witness of her happiness, rounded, full, complete, sanctified by
motherhood. Think, Mary, of my holding Helen's children on my knee!"

"I think often of grandmotherhood myself," my mother replied. "It is a
symptom of advancing age, James."

I heard the talk, but Helen was far enough from guessing what plans her
father was forming for his ultimate satisfaction, and I could fancy her
superb disdain at such mention. It was easy for me to see that her love
for her father was quite enough for her: she invested it with all the
charming prettinesses that a dainty coquette uses with her lover. She
was arch, gay, imperious, tender, all in a breath: I confess that I
often felt that, let her once put forth her might, not Georgy Lenox
could