I exclaimed: "is she all alone?"

"I fancy your mother is with her," he returned, glancing back at the
letter. "She says she shall send for Mrs. Randolph. She and I are
executors of the old man's will. I try to feel solemn over the death,"
he went on gravely. "With all our belief in immortality, death is a
terrible thing to regard closely. But yet he was an old, old man: am I
wrong that I cannot mourn for him?"

We went about our preparations for return at once. Vanished were our
plans for Venice and the Alps. I had looked forward with pleasure to
spending my summer with Dart. No man in the world is so good a comrade
as an enthusiastic painter, and Harry was keen of eye, with an exquisite
pleasure in form and color: nothing came amiss to him between earth and
sky. It had been a pleasant dream with us to go together about Venice,
rowed by some sweet-voiced Luigi or Antonio from one stretch of
sea-kissed marble palace-steps to another--to spend our mornings in dim
basilicas, our afternoons away across the widening lagoons, and finish
the day in the square of San Marco listening to Bellini's and Verdi's
airs. But now that this sweet idleness of Italy must be put by, I was
glad that we were to come back home again. I was a little surprised to
find myself almost as eager as Mr. Floyd in making preparations for
return. In a week we were on the ocean.

Mr. Floyd had seemed to enjoy our travels. He was always in good
spirits, always a brilliant and engaging talker, a pleased observer and
clever analyst. Harry and I had made the usual display of unlimited
fastidiousness which youth delights in, but our elder had taken
everything more kindly. He could not fatigue himself, and rarely looked
at more than two or three pictures at a time.

"I used to feel," he would say, "if I went away from a gallery without
a crick in my back and a blinding headache that I had no realization of
my aesthetic privileges. Now-a-days I am willing to confess that I find
too much of everything. Besides, all these pictures have been so
overpraised! Let us find some pleasure that is not in the guide-books."

This was his tone, and I discovered in it at times, despite all his
cheerfulness, a strange fatigue of spirit. But now that he was on his
way home he had suddenly become exuberantly joyful.

"It is so delightful," he would remark to me, "to realize once more that
the chief end of man is not, after all, to have fluent meditations upon
wrecks of l