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.” “But not the way Magdalen said it,” Frank rejoined. “She was in earnest. She meant it, I am sure.” “Try her with Roger’s consent. Tell her _he_ wishes it; not that he is _willing_, but that he _wishes_ it. You will find that argument all-powerful,” Mrs. Irving said. Being a woman herself she knew how to work upon another woman’s feelings, and she talked to and encouraged her son until he caught something of her hopefulness, and saw himself the fortunate possessor of all the glorious beauty and sprightliness embodied in Magdalen, who little dreamed of what lay before her, and who next morning, at the breakfast table, wondered at Frank’s exhilaration of spirits and Roger’s evident depression. He was very pale, and bore the look of one who had not slept; but he tried to be cheerful, and smiled a faint, sickly kind of smile at Magdalen’s lively badinage with Frank, whom she teased and coquetted with something after her olden fashion, not because she enjoyed it, but because she saw there was a cloud somewhere, and would fain dispel it. She never joked with Roger as she did with Frank; but this morning when she met him in the hall, where he was drawing on his gloves preparatory to going out, she asked him what was the matter, and if he had one of his bad headaches coming on. “His throat was a little sore,” he said; “he did not sleep much last night, but the walk to the village would do him good.”