that are
sure now to come true, but Gertrude tosses restlessly and sighs for her
lost youth. Twenty-nine seems fearfully old to-night, for the next will
be thirty. She does not care for marriage now; but she has an impending
dread of something,--it may be a contrast with that beautiful, blooming
woman.

"For I know she will _try_ to get Floyd," she says, with a bitter sigh.

This fear haunts the mother's pillow as well. Many aims and hopes of
her life have failed. She loves her younger son with a tender fervor,
but she does not desire to have the elder wrested out of her hands, and
become a guest in the home where she has reigned mistress.

Truly they are not all beds of roses.

CHAPTER III.

"Let the world roll blindly on,
Give me shadow, give me sun,
And a perfumed day as this is."

It is hardly dawn as yet, and the song of countless robins wakes Floyd
Grandon. How they fling their notes back at one another, with a merry
audacity that makes him smile! Then a strange voice, a burst of higher
melody, a warble nearer, farther, fainter, a "sweet jargoning" among
them all, that lifts his soul in unconscious praise. At first there is
a glimmer of mystery, then he remembers,--it is his boyhood's home.
There were just such songs in Aunt Marcia's time, when he slept up
under the eaves of the steeply peaked roof.

The dawn flutters out, faint opal and gray, then rose and yellow, blue
and a sort of silvery haze. It does not burst into sudden glory, but
dallies in translucent seas, changing, fading, growing brighter, and
lo, the world is burnished with a faint, tender gold. The air is sweet
with dewy grasses, the spice of pines, rose, and honeysuckle, and the
scent of clover-blooms, that hint of midsummer. There is the river,
with its picturesque shores, and purple blue peaks opposite; down
below, almost hidden by the grove, the cluster of homes, in every
variety of beauty, that are considered the _par excellence_ of Grandon
Park. Mrs. Grandon would fain destroy the grove, since she loves to be
seen of her neighbors; but Floyd always forbade it, and his father
would not consent, so it still stands, to his delight.

"If this is the home feeling, so eloquently discoursed upon, it has not
been overrated," he says softly to himself. "Home," with a lingering
inflection.

"Papa! papa!" The fleet bare feet reach him almost as soon as the
ringing voice. "I was afraid you were not here. Is this truly home?"

"Truly