As Roy grew to manhood he caused the old place to be modernized and beautified, until at last there were few country seats on the river which could compete with it in the luxuriousness of its internal adorning, or the beauty of the grounds around it. Broad terraces were there, with mounds and beds of bright flowers showing among the soft green turf; gravel walks which wound in and out among clumps of evergreen and ran past cosey arbors and summerhouses, over some of which the graceful Wisteria was trailing, while others were gorgeous with the flowers of the wonderful Trumpet-creeper. Here and there the ripple of a fountain was heard, while the white marble of urns and statuary showed well amid the dense foliage of shrubbery and trees. That Roy had lived to be twenty-eight and never married, or shown a disposition to do so, was a marvel to all, and latterly some of the old dowagers of the neighborhood who had young ladies to dispose of had seriously taken the matter in hand, to see if something could not be done with the grave, impassive man. He was polite and agreeable to all the girls, and treated them with that thoughtful deference so pleasing to women, and so rarely found in any man who has not the kindest and the best of hearts. But he never passed a certain bound in his attentions, and the young ladies from New York who spent their summers in the vicinity of Leighton Place went back to town discouraged, and hopeless so far as Roy was concerned. “It was really a shame, and he getting older every year,” Mrs. Freeman Burton of Oakwood said, as on a bright October morning in the autumn succeeding the May day when we first met with Roy, she drove her ponies down the smooth road by the river and turned into the park at Leighton. “Yes; it really is a shame that there is not a young and handsome mistress to grace all this, and Georgie would be just the one if Roy could only see it,” the lady continued to herself, as she drove to the side door which was ajar, though there was no sign of life around the house except the watch-dog Rover, who lay basking in the sunlight with a beautiful Maltese kitten sleeping on his paws.