Then Roger looked up a moment, and the pencil which had been so busy began to trace a long black line through every name as if he thus would blot out the sweetest dream of his life.
“Have my permission to address Magdalen? Yes—certainly, if he wants it. I had thought—yes, I had hoped—I had supposed—”
Here Roger came to a full stop, and then, as the only thing he could do, he added,—
“I thought I had heard something about a Miss Grey of New York, and that probably has misled me. Was there nothing in that report?”
“Nothing,” Mrs. Irving replied. “Frank knew her in New Haven and met her abroad, and so it was only natural he should call upon her in New York. There is nothing in that rumor; absolutely nothing. Frank’s mind was too full of Magdalen for him to care for a hundred Miss Greys. Poor foolish boy, it brings my own youth back to me to see him so infatuated. I must go to him now, for I know how anxiously he is waiting for me. Thank you for the favorable answer I can give him.”
She hurried from the room and out into the hall, never stopping to heed the voice which called after her,—
“Helen, oh, Helen!”
Roger did not know what he wanted to say to her. His call was a kind of protest against her considering the matter settled as wholly as she seemed to think it was. He could not give Magdalen up so easily,—he must make one effort for himself,—and so he had tried to call his sister back, but she did not hear him, and went on her way, leaving him alone with his great sorrow.
Frank was in his own room, lazily reclining in his easy chair and about finishing the second cigar in which he had indulged since dinner. He took his third when his mother came in, for he saw that she had something to tell him, and he could listen so much better when he was smoking. With a faint protest against the atmosphere of the room, which was thick with the fumes of tobacco, Mrs. Walter Scott began her story, telling him that he had Roger’s consent to speak to Magdalen as soon as he liked, but not telling him of her suspicions that Roger, too, would in time have spoken for himself, if his nephew had not first taken the field. It was strange that such a possibility had never occurred to Frank. He, too, had a fancy that Roger was too old for Magdalen,—that he was really more her father than her lover, and he never dreamed of him as a rival.
“I wish you could arrange it with Magdalen as easily as you have with Roger,” he said; and his mother replied, “She will think better of it another time. Girls frequently say no at first.”