She had called him “Charlie,” and the old familiar name carried her back to the Seminary days, when, aside from Aunt Jerry, she had not known what sorrow was,—and she was uncertain how Mrs. Churchill would take it. There was something very sad in the tone of her voice as she uttered the name, Charlie,—_pitiful_, Mrs. Churchill thought; and she deepened her grasp on Edna’s hand and said, “Call him Charlie always when speaking of him to me. It makes it seem as if you had known him, and I can talk more freely to you than to a stranger. He was my baby, my poor boy; full of faults, but always loving and kind to his mother. Oh! Charlie, my darling. I wish I had him back. I wish he had not done so.” The tears were pouring over the poor woman’s face, and Edna’s kept company with them. She knew what the mother wished he had not done, and knew that but for her he would not have done it, and she felt for a few moments as if she were really guilty of Charlie’s death; and could she then have restored him to his mother by going herself back to the house by the graveyard, and taking up her lonely life as it had been before she knew Charlie Churchill, she would have done so. But there was no going back when once death had entered in; and all she now could do was to comfort and love the helpless woman who clung to her so confidingly, and who seemed so much afraid of overtaxing or wearying her out. “You have always been in school, I hear,” she said, after they had returned to the house, and Edna had read aloud to her awhile. “Teaching must be accompanied with more excitement than sitting here and amusing me, so I shall not tax you much at first, lest you get tired of me. Go, now, and enjoy yourself where you like. Perhaps Roy will take you to drive. I’ll ask him; I hear his step now. Roy, come here, please.”