Roy’s guests had missed him, and commented upon his absence, and Mrs. Churchill had wondered if he could not find her shawl, and Edna had offered to go herself for it. Then Mrs. Burton said that she had left Georgie in the house, and probably she and Roy were deep in some learned discussion, as they usually got up an argument when they were together. She would go herself for Mrs. Churchill’s shawl, as she knew just where it was. But Mrs. Churchill would not suffer this. She preferred that Miss Overton should go; and accordingly Edna went, and in passing through the hall glanced into the drawing-room, and saw the couple at the farther end too much absorbed in themselves to know there was a witness to their love-making. Roy was kissing Georgie as the seal to their betrothal, and by that token Edna knew they were engaged, and felt for a moment as if the brightness of her life had suddenly been stricken out, though why she should care, she could not tell. She only knew that she did care, and that her heart was throbbing painfully as she fled noiselessly up the stairs in the direction of Mrs. Churchill’s room. Once there, she stopped a moment to breathe and think over what she had seen, and ask herself what it was to her, that the heart-beats should come so fast, and the world should look so dark. “Nothing, nothing,” she said, “only he might have done so much better, and have been so much happier. I don’t like her, and when she comes here I must go; and I could enjoy so much alone with Roy and his mother;” and having thus settled the cause of her disquiet, she found Mrs. Churchill’s shawl, and left the house by another way than the one leading past the parlor door. She had been very gay just before, so gay indeed that Miss Agatha, who did not believe in a plebeian’s daring to be merry and free in the presence of superiors, had made some sarcastic remarks about “the wild spirits of that Miss Overton.” But she was not wild when she returned to the lawn with the shawl, and her face was so pale, that Maude asked if she had seen a ghost that she looked so white and scared. “No,” Edna replied; “but I ran quite fast up and down the stairs.” “And did you see anything of my daughter,” Mrs. Burton asked next, and Edna answered her evasively: “I heard voices in the parlor, hers and Mr. Leighton’s, I think.” “Oh, yes, there they come,” Mrs. Burton rejoined, her face all aglow with the great delight it afforded her to sit and watch Georgie coming toward her so graceful and self-possessed, and looking so radiant and beautiful.