Then she had come to tear Magdalen from him; now she was there to take his fortune, his birthright away; and it is not strange that, cruel as she was, she hesitated how to begin. “Roger,” she said, in reply to his question, “I am here on a most unpleasant errand, but one which, as a mother whose first duty is to her son, I must perform. You remember the Will which at your father’s death could not be found.” She was taking it from her pocket, and Roger, who was quick of comprehension, knew before she laid the worn paper upon the table, that _the lost Will was found_! With trembling haste he snatched it up, and she made no effort to restrain him. She had faith in the man she was ruining. She knew the Will was safe in his hands; he would neither destroy nor deface it. He would give it its due consideration, and she sat watching him while he read it through, and pitying him, it must be confessed, with all the little womanly feeling she had left. She would have been a stone not to have pitied one whose lips uttered no sound as he read, but quivered and trembled, and grew so bloodless and thin, while his face dripped with the perspiration which started from every pore and rolled down his chin in drops. She thought at first they were tears, but when he lifted his eyes to hers as he finished reading, she saw that they were dry, but oh, so full of pain and anguish and surprise, and wounded love and grief, that his father should have disinherited him for such a cause. He knew what the clause “the boy known as Roger Lennox Irving” implied, and that hurt him more than all the rest. Why had his father believed such a thing of his mother, and who had told him the shameful story? Leaning across the table to his sister he pointed to the clause, and moving his finger slowly under each word, said to her in a voice she would never have recognized as his, “Helen, who poisoned my father’s mind with that tale?” Mrs. Walter Scott did not know of the letter in Magdalen’s possession, or how much Hester Floyd had overheard years before, when, with lying tongue, she had hinted things she knew could not be true, and made the old man mad with jealousy. She did not think how soon she would be confronted with her lie, and she answered, “I do not know. It is the first intimation I have heard of Squire Irving’s reason for changing his Will.” She had forgotten her language to Lawyer Schofield the night after the funeral when the other Will was the subject of debate; but Roger remembered it, and his eyes rested steadily on her face as he said, “You do not know? You never heard it hinted that my mother was false, then?” “Never,” she felt constrained to say, for there was something in those burning eyes which threatened her with harm if by word or look she breathed aught against the purity of poor Jessie Morton.