Edna had frequently played at Rocky Point; sometimes with Maude, sometimes with Ruth Gardner, and sometimes with Uncle Phil for an opponent, and except when playing against the latter, was generally beaten, so she took the mallet Roy brought to her with some hesitation, declaring her inability to interest a skilful player, much less to beat. “Let me teach you then,” Roy said. “You can learn a great deal in an hour.” To this Edna readily assented, and the game began with Roy as teacher. But Edna soon found that the uneven ground at Uncle Phil’s, where the balls hid themselves in all sorts of holes and depressions, was a very different thing from the closely-shaven lawn which had been rolled and pounded until it was nearly as smooth as a carpeted floor. She could play here, and was astonished at her own success, and struck so boldly and surely, that Roy soon gave up the task of teaching her, and began to look after his own interests. She was such a little creature, and he so tall and big, that he almost felt as if playing with his daughter, though never did a father watch the motions of his child with just the same feelings with which Roy watched Edna as she moved from point to point, now showing her dimpled hands, and now poising her little boot upon her ball preparatory to croqueting it away. She was very lithe, very graceful, and very modest withal, and she beat Roy twice out of five games, and when at last they were through, and Roy led her to his mother, he said to her, laughingly: “Remember you are engaged to me for the first game.” He was extremely kind and gentle, and though Edna had known him personally for only twenty-four hours, she had seen enough to understand just how thoroughly good and noble he was; how different from Charlie, who, had he lived, could hardly have satisfied her now. But Charlie was dead, and she went from the croquet ground to his grave, with his mother, and laid a cluster of flowers upon the sod which covered him, and felt like a guilty hypocrite when Mrs. Churchill pressed her hand and thanked her “for remembering my poor boy.” “I would like flowers put here every day,” she said; “but my eyesight is so bad that I cannot see, while Roy’s hands are not skilful in fashioning bouquets, and we have had no young lady staying here permanently until now.” “Charlie shall have flowers so long as they last,” Edna replied with a trembling voice, while into her face there came a look of pain something like what it had worn on that dreadful night in Iona.