a month he was traveling from one establishment to another. At a beam-mill in Frankfort he observed that the piles made ready for the heating-furnaoe contained more than twice as much steel scrap as it was the custom to use at New Rome. He made a memorandum and a sketch of one of the piles; and if his trip had produced nothing else, this casual discovery would, as it afterwards turned out, have justified it. For when Floyd returned and tried the new method, he found that it effected a saving in manufacture of nearly a hundred dollars a day.
He had been in Berlin a little more than two weeks when a cablegram came from his grandfather saying that Mrs. Halket was desperately ill and summoning him home at once.
Floyd caught the Bremen boat the next morning; the pilot boat that met the steamer in New York harbor a week later brought him a letter edged with black. His grandmother had died the day he sailed. "It was pneumonia," Colonel Halket wrote. "She did not suffer much—after the first; she was unconscious and spoke only once, an hour before the end, when she murmured something—asking for you, I think. The funeral service will take place as soon as you arrive. I shall be very glad to see you, Floyd."
There was no word to betray his emotion. Floyd had an equal power of repression. He folded the letter and put it quietly into his pocket, and no one of those standing by would have guessed that he had just read the saddest news that could come to him. But when he had landed and was sitting in the friendly obscurity and loneliness of a cab, he dropped his face forward in his hands and tears trickled through his fingers. He felt miserably forlorn and alone. How much brightness and sweetness and unselfish, gentle wisdom had gone out of life when his grandmother had died! Even though in the nature of things this could not have been many years distant, Floyd had never really looked forward to life without her. The
