Both Roger and Frank knew she referred to Mrs. Walter Scott, who, if angry glances could have annihilated her, would have done so. But Hester was not afraid of her, and went on, not very connectedly, but still intelligibly, to those who were listening so intently: “She pisoned his mind with snaky, insinuatin’ lies, which she didn’t exactly speak out, as I heard, but hinted at, and made me so mad that I wanted to throttle her then, and I wish I had bust into the room and told her it was all a lie, as I could prove and swear to; for, from the day Jessie Morton married Squire Irving until the summer she went to Saratoga, when you, Roger, was quite a little shaver, she never laid eyes on that man, who was her ruin afterward. I know it is so, and so does others, for I’ve inquired; and if the scamp was here, he’d tell you so, which I wish he was, and if I knew where to find him, I’d go on my hands and knees to get his word, too, that what this good-for-nothing snake in the grass told was a lie!” Human nature could endure no more, and Mrs. Walter Scott sprang to her feet, and turning to her son, asked,— “If he, a man, would sit quietly, and hear his mother so abused?” “You have a right to stop her,” she said, as she saw Frank hesitate. “A right to turn her out of the house.” “I’d like to see him do it,” Hester rejoined, her old face aglow with passion and fierce anger. “Hush, Hester, hush,” Roger said, in his quiet, gentle way; “and you, Helen, sit down and listen. If I can bear this, you certainly can.” The perspiration was rolling from his face in great drops a second time, and something like a groan broke from his lips as he covered his eyes with his hands and said, “My mother, oh, my mother, that I should hear her so maligned.” “She wan’t maligned,” Hester exclaimed, misinterpreting the meaning of the word. “It was a lie, the whole on’t. She never left this house except for church or parties, and only three of them, one to Miss Johnson’s, one to Squire Schofield’s, and one to Mrs. Lennox’s, and a few calls, from the time she came here till after you was born; I know, I was here, I was your nurse, I waited on her, and loved her like my own from the moment she cried so on my neck and said she didn’t want to come here. She was too young to come as his wife. She was nothin’ but a child, and when she couldn’t stan’ the racket any longer she run away.” Roger was shaking now as with an ague fit. Here was something which Hester could not deny. Jessie had run away and left him, her baby boy. There was no getting smoothly over that, and he shivered with pain as the old woman went on: “I don’t pretend to excuse her, though there’s a good deal to be said on both sides, and it most broke her heart, as a body who see her as I did that last night at home would know.”