I laughed. "You will find Helen a magnificent young lady by this time," I returned. "She is seventeen, is she not? A good many men will fight for the pleasure of showing her about, and likely as not she will not look at me."
"She is as old as her mother was when I married her," said Mr. Floyd thoughtfully. "Can it be that people will want to be marrying my little girl? I want her all to myself for a time. Who knows how long? I have been a lonely man, and now I want close, intimate human companionship. I am tired of doing, I am tired of thinking. I am out of politics: I am ready for enjoyment. It seems to me I can be very happy with Helen and your mother close at hand. We shall not be a dreary family. Your mother and I can sit together and talk: you and Helen can have your little amusements. Now that she is to be quite unrestricted, I hope and expect a little nonsense from her."
"But, sir—" I began hesitatingly.
"But what, pray?"
"You cannot believe that we are all to live together. It is time for me to make a beginning in life, and my mother must be with me."
"You have made a very handsome beginning," returned Mr. Floyd dryly. "Once for all, Floyd, I will have no nonsense of independence and pride from you. You are to me as my own son. I may talk much of Helen, because our love for women is of the kind that gives us the impulse to proclaim it, but she is scarcely more dear to me than you are. You are part of my life now: don't fret me and make me miserable by deserting me. Be as free as air and follow out every wish of your heart, yet, all the same, feel that your home is where my home is, your interests where mine are."
As soon as we landed we had news of my mother having joined Helen at The Headlands shortly after Mr. Raymond's death. Mr. Floyd wasted not an hour in New York, but went on to his daughter at once. I lingered behind him, detained in part by some delays at the custom-house. I longed to see my mother, but felt, though with but little of the old jealousy, that Mr. Floyd had almost the best right to see her first, because, now-a-days, I was always looking the truth square in the face, and realizing that it could not be long before cruel and irremediable loss was to encompass us, and that the rest of our lives we should have not substance, but shadowy memories only, in place of this dear friend of ours. So I let him speed on to The Headlands, and dreamed of the love-flush on the cheeks of the two women who met him there.
I knew comparatively little of my old set of friends, and of late Jack Holt had almost slipped out of my circle of correspondents. I was aware that his marriage had been delayed the previous year and the time fixed for Christmas, but neither Harry nor I had been advised of it, and my mother had only written that she heard there were fresh delays, and that the elder Holt had involved his firm in difficulties. I determined, therefore, to stop at Belfield on my way to The Headlands and see Jack and all the old friends I might still have remaining there. Of late years my passing associations had become so diffused with their endless transitions that every memory of my old home was becoming more and more fixed and permanent, the nucleus of my recollection distinct and unchangeable.
I reached Belfield early one morning late in May. The season was perhaps a little late, for the apple trees were still in bloom, and the village looked fair and virginal as a bride on her wedding-day. I walked along the wide pleasant streets with a curious pain. The years that lay between me and the last day I had paced these broad walks under the pale greenery of the elms seemed legendary and dreamlike. There was the schoolhouse on the hill, and the well-worn playground about it. Beyond lay the woods, half colored now with clear pellucid green, gleams of silver and shades of scarlet here and there. My mind reverted with clearness to the little nooks and dingles of the hills and meadows thereabouts: I remembered a woodland spring boiling up in a hollow of the greenest grass I ever saw, and in the copse beside it grew the most beautiful rose-tinted anemones. I could have gone to the foot of a great oak and found the root of white violets which had been one of my earliest and dearest secrets; and I wondered—with a longing inexpressibly strong to go and seek it—if there were still a nest in a little hollow I knew of, where in my time I had watched scores of yellow-beaked nestlings.
I went past the house where my mother and I had lived so many years. It was so changed I should not have recognized it, repainted and modernized with much show of glass and bow-windows. There were few people to be seen along the white walks until I met the stream from the post-office. Old men and boys, shy girls and children, came out with their letters and papers just as in the old time. Some of the men, grown corpulent and gray, I recognized with the old feeling of reverence and love, and stopped to speak with them. But Belfield life, slow and stagnant though it was, was busy enough to have filled their minds with fresher memories, and I was so nearly forgotten that there was small pleasure in reminding them of the lad who had grown from babyhood into a tall stripling among them. My sentiment passed. I looked about more coldly even at the street that led to the cottage where Georgy Lenox lived, and went on briskly to the great stone house of the Holts. Georgy would be there of course: impossible that another Easter could have passed without her being a bride. I wondered as I entered the open iron gate what she would say to me.