is awfully bright, and took honors right along."

The next day Malcom brought his friend to his mother, whose heart he won
at once by his evident delicate health, his gentlemanly manners, and,
perhaps most of all, because he had been an orphan for years, and was so
much alone in the world. She decided to welcome him to her home, and to
give him the companionship of her young people.

Howard Sinclair was a young man of brilliant intellectual promise. He
had inherited most keen sensibilities, an almost morbid delicacy of
thought, a variable disposition, and a frail body. Both father and
mother died before he was ten years of age, leaving a large fortune for
him, their only child; and, since then, his home had been with an aged
grandmother. Without any young companions in the home, and lacking
desire for activity, he had given himself up to an almost wholly
sedentary life. The body, so delicate by nature, had always been made
secondary to the alert mind. His luxurious tastes could all be
gratified, and thus far he had lived like some conservatory plant.

The very darling of his grandmother's heart, it was like death to her to
part from him when the physicians decided that to save his life it was
an imperative necessity that he should live for a a time in a warmer
climate. It was an utter impossibility for her to accompany him. He
shrank from any other companion, therefore had set forth with only his
faithful John, who had been an old servant in the family before he was
born, as valet. He went first to Egypt, where he had remained as long as
the heat would permit, then had gone northwest to the Italian lakes and
Switzerland, whence he had now come to spend a time in Florence.

Lonely, homesick, and disheartened, it was indeed like a "gift of the