instead of only practising a desultory accomplishment, she was able to
compose and arrange her tuneful ideas correctly.

A dark striking-looking girl interrupted them. This was Cecil Rolleston,
the eldest daughter of the house, or rather she stood in that relation to
the Colonel, being the offspring of his first wife.

"Come out and play croquet, Bluebell," said she; "the children are having
a game; they only let me go on condition of bringing you,"--and she led
the way through the window into a charming garden, with large shady
maple-trees just beginning to drop their deep-dyed, variegated leaves on
the turf; the bluebirds were already gone, but the red and ashen-hued
robin, nearly the size of a jay, still rustled through the boughs.

A little white dog, with a ribbon on, was holding a ball within its
feathery toes, and playing with it as a cat does a mouse; a gardener was
refreshing the thirsty flowers, which had outgrown their strength; and
Fleda, Estelle, and Lola, twelve, eleven, and nine, were playing croquet
with the zest of recent emancipation from lessons.

The governess, a dark, sallow expositor of the arts and sciences, also
wielded a mallet, and Cecil and Bluebell completed the six.

The sides were pretty equally cast, and the combatants were in a most
interesting crisis of the game, when Colonel Rolleston entered the
garden.

He was a very handsome man, and as is often the case with the only male
in a family of women, so studied and given in to by all his female
_entourage_, that he would not have been pleased, whatever their