Roy confessed to thirty, and Aunt Jerry complimented him by saying “she’d ’sposed him older than that,” and then glancing at the clock, which pointed at half-past eleven, she asked him to stay to dinner, “and see how poor folks lived.” Roy’s first impulse was to decline, but in spite of himself he was attracted by this queer woman, who boiled soap in so unsightly a garb, and quoted Shakespeare while she did it, and showed, in all she said and did, a striking originality of character, which pleased while it surprised him. He accepted her invitation to dine with her, and while she was making the needful preparations, looked curiously around the home which had once been Edna’s. It was scrupulously neat and clean, and very comfortable, still he could imagine just how a bright young girl would pine and languish there, and long to break away from the grim stillness and loneliness of the house. “Poor Edna,” he said to himself, more than once, while there awoke in his heart a longing to take the little girl in his arms and comfort her, after all she had borne of loneliness and sorrow. Aunt Jerry’s dinner, though not like the dinners at Leighton Place, was tempting and appetizing, and Roy did full justice to it, and drank two cups of coffee, for the cream, he said, and ate two pieces of berry pie, and a fried cake for dessert, and suffered from dyspepsia for the remainder of the day. Aunt Jerry asked him to spend the night, but Roy declined, and said good-by to her soon after dinner was over. His attempt to find Edna was a failure, and he went back to his mother, who, secretly, was glad, for she was not at all enthusiastic with regard to having her daughter-in-law for a companion. She greatly preferred Miss Overton from Rocky Point. Indeed, she had conceived quite a liking for that unknown young lady, and as soon as Roy came home and reported his ill success, she made him write at once to Miss Overton, asking if she would come, and what her terms were. “Perhaps you’d better name three hundred and fifty dollars a year; that surely is enough,” Mrs. Churchill said; and so Roy, to whom a few dollars more or less was nothing, and who felt that to be constantly with a half-blind, nervous invalid was no desirable position, made it four hundred dollars, and asked for an early reply. CHAPTER XXVII. EDNA ACCEPTS.