Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/89

78 "If you stayed, I should be so angry that I would never come to see you," he answered firmly. "Next Monday for Ridgewood, Grandfather."

"Next Monday, I think," Colonel Halket agreed. He was quite impatient to have them both leave the room and to resume his digging of feasible remarks out of Boswell. "Good-night, my dear; good-night, Floyd."

But neither of them went immediately to bed. Mrs. Halket took Floyd into her sitting-room and talked to him for nearly an hour; he came away feeling a little sad and more than ever touched by her affection. For she had made him see how much indeed he was to her; she had told him of his father, her only child, who for his thirty years of life had been the growing light and happiness of Colonel Halket and of herself. After his untimely death, the young widow had not long survived him; and then the grandparents had taken the baby, and, said Mrs. Halket to Floyd, "It was as if we were beginning life all over, and with the knowledge that the best of it could never be ours again. Oh, it was worse than that, Floyd; I can't tell you what it was at first when we had to feel that we had you, poor little baby indeed, but not, not our dear boy. Yet now you're ours, just as much as your father ever was; we began life all over again, your grandfather and I; we've toiled through it again, watching you grow and develop; we love you as if you were your father, and now you're about to continue and fill out his career. Can you see how much you mean? You've been away from me much the last few years; it was necessary; I don't lament it; you must be away from me now; that is hard, too, and still I won't complain. But oh, Floyd, if anything should happen to you—do I seem very silly and absurd, my dear? Yet it wakes me in the night, to think of—and it is, you know, dangerous there in the mills—it's a dangerous employment, Floyd, and I say a prayer every night of my life for the safety of the poor men who work there for your grandfather. And if