"Would you just please, then," said Barbara in a hurry, as somebody
came down toward them in pursuit of a ball, "to hush up, and let me
have it all to myself for a while? And then," she added, as the stray
ball was driven up the lawn again, and the player went away after it,
"come some day and help us get it up at Westover? it's such a thing,
you see, to get anything that's new."

"I see. To be sure. You shall have the State Right,--isn't that what
they make over for patent concerns? And we'll have something famous
out of it. They're getting tired of croquet, or thinking they ought to
be, which is the same thing." It was Barbara's turn now; she hit Harry
Goldthwaite's ball with one of her precise little taps, and, putting
the two beside each other with her mallet, sent them up rollicking
into the thick of the fight, where the final hand-to-hand struggle was
taking place between the last two wickets and the stake. Everybody was
there in a bunch when she came; in a minute everybody of the opposing
party was everywhere else, and she and Harry had it between them
again. She played out two balls, and then, accidentally, her own.
After one "distant, random gun," from the discomfited foe, Harry
rolled quietly up against the wand, and the game was over.

It was then and there that a frank, hearty liking and alliance was
re-established between Harry Goldthwaite and Barbara, upon an old
remembered basis of ten years ago, when he had gone away to school and
given her half his marbles for a parting keepsake,--"as he might have
done," we told her, "to any other boy."

"Ruth hasn't had a good time," said mother, softly, standing in her
door, looking through at the girls laying away ribbons and pulling