eyes. A very well-looking young man though — very gentlemanly
too."

Fleda had heard all this and much more about her parents some
dozens of times before; but she and her grandfather were never
tired of going it over. If the conversation that recalled his
lost treasures had of necessity a character of sadness and
tenderness, it yet bespoke not more regret that he had lost
them than exulting pride and delight in what they had been, —
perhaps not so much. And Fleda delighted to go back and feed
her imagination with stories of the mother whom she could not
remember, and of the father whose fair bright image stood in
her memory as the embodiment of all that is high and noble and
pure. A kind of guardian angel that image was to little Fleda.
These ideal likenesses of her father and mother, the one drawn
from history and recollection, the other from history only,
had been her preservative from all the untoward influences and
unfortunate examples which had surrounded her since her
father's death, some three or four years before, had left her
almost alone in her grandfather's house. They had created in
her mind a standard of the true and beautiful in character,
which nothing she saw around her, after, of course, her
grandfather and one other exception, seemed at all to meet;
and partly from her own innate fineness of nature, and partly
from this pure ideal always present with her, she had shrunk
almost instinctively from the few varieties of human nature
the country-side presented to her, and was in fact a very
isolated little being, living in a world of her own, and
clinging with all her strong out-goings of affection to her
grandfather only; granting to but one other person any