once--to look beautiful at a party!"

The best of it for Barbara had been on the lawn, before tea.

Barbara was a magnificent croquet-player. She and Harry Goldthwaite
were on one side, and they led off their whole party, going
nonchalantly through wicket after wicket, as if they could not help
it; and after they had well distanced the rest, just toling each
other along over the ground, till they were rovers together, and came
down into the general field again with havoc to the enemy, and the
whole game in their hands on their own part.

"It was a handsome thing to see, for once," Dakie Thayne said; "but
they might make much of it, for it wouldn't do to let them play on the
same side again."

It was while they were off, apart down the slope, just croqueted away
for the time, to come up again with tremendous charge presently, that
Harry asked her if she knew the game of "ship-coil."

[Illustration]

Barbara shook her head. What was it?

"It is a pretty thing. The officers of a Russian frigate showed it to
us. They play it with rings made of spliced rope; we had them plain
enough, but you might make them as gay as you liked. There are ten
rings, and each player throws them all at each turn. The object is to
string them up over a stake, from which you stand at a certain
distance. Whatever number you make counts up for your side, and you
play as many rounds as you may agree upon."

Barbara thought a minute, and then looked up quickly.

"Have you told anybody else of that?"

"Not here. I haven't thought of it for a good while."

"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 la