Frank bowed in acquiescence, and, leaving the room, was soon knocking at Hester Floyd’s door. CHAPTER XXIV. HESTER AND THE WILL. Hester was sitting by her fire knitting a sock for Roger, and Aleck was with her, smoking his pipe in the corner, and occasionally opening his small, sleepy eyes to look at his better half when she addressed some remark to him. They were a very quiet, comfortable, easy-looking couple as they sat there together in the pleasant room which had been theirs for more than forty years, and their thoughts were as far as possible from the storm-cloud bursting over their heads, and of which Frank was the harbinger. “Mrs. Floyd, Mr. Irving would like to see you in the library,” Frank said a little stiffly, and in his manner there was a tinge of importance and self-assurance unusual to him when addressing the _head_ of Millbank, Mrs. Hester Floyd. Hester did not detect this manner, but she saw that he was agitated and nervous, and she dropped a stitch in her knitting as she looked at him and said, “Roger wants me in the library? What for? Has anything happened that you look white as a rag?” Frank was twenty-seven years old, but there was still enough of the child about him to make him like to be first to communicate news whether good or bad, and to Hester’s question he replied, “Yes. _The missing will is found._” Hester dropped a whole needle full of stitches, and she was whiter now than Frank as she sprang to Aleck’s side and shook him so vigorously that the pipe fell from his mouth, and the stolid, stupid look left his face for once as she said: “Do you hear, Aleck, the will is found! The will that turns Roger out-doors.” Aleck did not seem so much agitated as his wife, and after gazing blankly at her for a moment, he slowly picked up his pipe and said, with the utmost nonchalance, “You better go and see to’t. You don’t want me along.” She did _not_ want him; that is, she did not need him; and with a gesture of contempt she turned from him to Frank, and said, “I am ready. Come.” There was nothing of the deference due to the heir of Millbank in her tone and manner. Frank would never receive that from her, and she flounced out into the hall, and kept a step or two in advance of the young man, to whom she said, “Who is with Roger? Anybody?” As she came nearer to the library she began to have a little dread of what she might encounter, and visions of lawyers and constables, armed and equipped to arrest her bodily, flitted uneasily before her mind; but when Frank replied, “There is no one there but mother,” her fear vanished, and was succeeded by a most violent fit of anger at the luckless Mrs. Walter Scott. “The jade!” she said. “I always mistrusted how her snoopin’ around would end. If I’d had my way, she should never have put foot inside this house, the trollop.” “Mrs. Floyd, you are speaking of my mother. You must stop. I cannot allow it.”