Millbank;

by Mary Jane Holmes

Frank had but little faith in his mother’s scheme, and he was about to tell her so, when Magdalen herself came in. She had just returned from accompanying Roger as far as the end of the avenue on his way to his office. He told her that a walk in the bracing air would do her good, and had taken her with him to the gate which was the entrance to the Millbank grounds. There they had lingered a little, and Roger had seemed more lover-like than ever before, and Magdalen’s eyes had shone on him like stars and kept him at her side long after he knew he ought to be at his office, where some of his men were waiting for him. At last, warned by the striking of the village clock of the lateness of the hour, he said a final good-by, and Magdalen returned to the house, flushed with excitement and radiant with happiness, which showed itself in her eyes and face, and in her unusual graciousness towards Frank. Now that she began herself to know what it was to love, and how terrible it would be to lose the object of her love, she pitied Frank so much, and never since that night in the library had she seemed to him so much like the Magdalen of old as she did, when, with her large straw hat upon her arm, she stood talking with him a few moments, mingling much of her old coquetry of manner with what she said, and leaving him at last perfectly willing that his mother should do anything which would further his cause with Magdalen.

That night, when dinner was over and Magdalen was with Hester, who was recovering rapidly, Mrs. Walter Scott took her balls of worsted and her crocheting, and knocking softly at the door of the library, where she knew Roger was, asked if she might come in. He thought it was Magdalen’s knock, and looked a little disappointed when he found who his visitor was. But he bade her come in, and bringing a chair for her near to the light, asked what he could do for her.

“I want to talk with you about Frank and Magdalen,” Mrs. Irving said. “You must of course have seen the growing affection between the young people?”

Mrs. Walter Scott pretended to be very busy counting her stitches, but she managed to steal a side glance at her companion, who fairly gasped at what he had heard, and whose fingers fluttered nervously among the papers on the table, on one of which he kept writing, in an absent kind of way and in every variety of hand, the name of Magdalen. He had not noticed the growing affection between the young people; that is, he had seen nothing on Magdalen’s part to warrant such a conclusion. Once, just after his return from Europe, he had thought his nephew’s attentions very marked, and a thought had crossed his mind as to what might possibly be the result. But all this was past, as he believed, and his sister’s intelligence came upon him like a thunderbolt, stunning him for an instant, and making him powerless to speak. Those were fierce heart-pangs which Roger was enduring, and they showed themselves upon his face, which was very pale, and the corners of his mouth twitched painfully, but his voice was steady and natural as he said at last,—

“And Magdalen,—does she—have you reason to believe she would return a favorable answer to Frank’s suit?”

Mrs. Irving was sure now that what she had suspected was true, and that nothing but a belief in Magdalen’s preference for another would avail with him, so she replied unhesitatingly,—

“Certainly I do. I have suspected for years that she was strongly attached to Frank, and her manner towards him fully warrants me in that belief. She is the soul of honor, and never professes what she does not feel.”

“Ye-es,” Roger said, with something between a sigh and a long-drawn breath, assenting thus to what his sister said, and trying to reconcile with it Magdalen’s demeanor toward himself of late.

If she was attached to Frank, and had been for years, why that sudden kindling of her eyes, and that lighting up of her whole face whenever he was with her, and why that sweet graciousness of manner towards him which she had of late evinced? Was Magdalen a coquette, or was that the way of girls? Roger did not know,—he had never made them a study, never been interested in any girl or woman except Magdalen; and now, when he must lose her, he began to feel that he had loved her always from the moment when he took her as his child and first held her baby hands in his, and laid her soft cheek against his own. She was his,—he had a better right to her than Frank, and he wrote her name all over the sheet of paper on the table, and thought of all the castles he had built within the last few weeks,—castles of the time when Magdalen would be really his and he could lavish upon her the love and tender caresses he would be coy of giving any one who was not his wife. Roger was naturally very reserved,—and in his intercourse with Magdalen he had only shown her glimpses of the deep, warm love he felt for her. He held peculiar notions about such things, and he was sorry now that he did,—sorry that he had not improved his opportunities and won her for his own before Frank appealed to him, as he had done through his mother, and thus sealed his lips forever. He was thinking of all this, and was so absorbed in it that he forgot his sister was there watching him narrowly, but veiling her watchfulness with her apparent interest in her worsted work, which became strangely tangled and mixed, and required her whole attention to unravel and set right. But she could not sit still all the evening and let Roger fill that sheet of foolscap with “Magdalen;” she must recall him to the point at issue, and so she said at last,—

“Frank will do nothing without your sanction, and what he wants is your permission, as Magdalen’s guardian, for him to address her. Can he have it?”