approached it, and when the gate to the entrance was reached, she stopped involuntarily, and laid her hand upon the iron railing. “My brother’s grave,” Roy said, standing close to her side. “Yes; your mother told me. I was here with her yesterday,” Edna replied, hoping thus to prevent Roy from talking to her of Charlie. She had felt guilty and mean when listening to Mrs. Churchill; and she should feel tenfold more guilty and mean, she thought, and find it harder work keeping quiet, if Roy, too, should tell her of his brother and his brother’s wife. But Roy did tell her of them, and talked a good deal of Edna, _his sister_, whom he had never seen but once. “Miss Burton tells me you resemble her,” he said; “and that may be the reason why you seem so little like a stranger to me. I should be so glad to know Edna,—to have her here at home. Poor girl! I am afraid she is finding the world a harsh one, struggling alone as she is!” He spoke so kindly that Edna had hard work to refrain from crying out: “Mr. Leighton, I am a liar, a cheat, an impostor! I am not what I seem. I am Edna, and not Miss Overton.” But she did not do it; and when at last she spoke, it was to ask if Mrs. Charlie Churchill had no friends or relatives, that she should be thus thrown upon her own resources. “Yes; she has an aunt,—a Miss Jerusha Pepper, whose name is something of an index to her character,” Roy said; and then, as there came up before his mind the picture of Aunt Jerry, as he first saw her, bending over her boiling caldron, and looking more like Macbeth’s witches than a civilized woman, he broke into a low, merry laugh, which brought a flush to Edna’s face, for she guessed of what he was thinking. She had heard from Aunt Jerry herself of Roy’s visit to Allen’s Hill, and how he had found her employed. “Dressed in my regimentals, and looking like the very evil one himself!” Aunt Jerry had written. And Edna, who knew _what_ the “regimentals” were, and how her aunt looked in them, wondered what Roy thought of her, and if she herself had not fallen somewhat in his estimation. She knew he was laughing at some reminiscence connected with that soap-making in the lane; and she could not forbear asking him if just the thoughts of Miss Jerusha were sufficient to provoke his risibles. “Well, yes,” Roy answered; “I always laugh when I think of her arrayed in the most wonderful costume you ever saw, I reckon, and deep in the mysteries of soap-making. And still, no queen ever bore herself more proudly than she did, as she tried to feign indifference to her own attire and my presence. “It was a pleasant enough place, or might be, with young people in it, though I fancy Edna must have led a dreary life there, and was thus more easily led to escape from it. Still, I am not certain, that in doing so, she has not proved, in her own experience, the truth of Scylla and Charybdis.”