"I hope you will like me, Helen," said I bluntly, "for your father wants you to enjoy my visit."
She smiled for the first time. "I like you very much already," she said in the same distinct, melancholy voice; and without more words she put up her little face to mine and kissed me softly on my lips. I was unused to caresses, and my cheeks burned; but I followed her, at her request, to the back lawn, where Mr. Raymond was waiting to see me.
"Grandfather is not strong," she explained, "and we save him all the steps we can. It is so sad to be old! Have you a grandfather?"
"No," I returned: "there is nobody in our family but mother and me."
"And I have got grandpa and papa too," said she thoughtfully. "Only papa is so busy: he is never here but a week at a time."
We had passed through the hall, crossed the rear piazza and descended the steps, and were advancing along the grassplat toward a summer-house which faced the sea. I could now for the first time gain an idea of the extent and grandeur of the place. The house towered above us solemnly with its towers, pillared arches, cornices and pediments, while, beyond, the glass roofs of numberless greenhouses lifted their domes to the warm afternoon sun. All around the lawn stood lofty trees, their foliage glorious with crimson, russet and gold, and their shadows crept stealthily toward us as if they were alive. And beyond house, lawns, gardens and tree-lined avenues was a pine wood which extended its solemn verdure all round the place, enclosing it almost to the edge of the bluff. All this on the right hand: on the left the mysterious sea, whose music filled the fair sunshiny world we two children were traversing hand in hand.
"There is grandpa," exclaimed Helen as we neared the summer-house; and I saw an old man sitting in an arm-chair in the sunshine, looking eagerly toward us as if in anxious expectation.
"You were gone a long time, Helen," he called out peevishly.
"Oh no, dear," she replied soothingly. "Here is Floyd, grandpa."
He had looked, when I first saw him from a distance, like a very old man, but when I was shaking hands with him I was surprised to discover that his face had little appearance of age. Even his thin dark hair was but sprinkled with gray at the curly ends on the temples: his eyebrows were a black silky thread, his eyes dark and full of a peculiar glitter. His features were finely formed and feminine in their delicacy, but the expression of his face was marred by the restlessness of his eyes, and made almost pathetic by the dejected, melancholy lines about his thin scarlet lips.