Roger made no reply to this, but tried to exonerate Magdalen from all blame with regard to the will, telling what he knew about her finding it, and begging Hester to lay aside her prejudice, and care for Magdalen as she would have done six weeks ago. And Hester promised, and called herself a foolish old woman for having distrusted the girl, and then went back to the sick-room, leaving Roger to follow her at his leisure. Something in Magdalen’s manner the previous night had led him to hope that possibly she was not irrevocably bound to Frank; there might be some mistake, and the future was not half so dreary when he thought of her sharing it with him. But Hester’s story swept all that away. Magdalen was lost to him, lost forever and ever, and for a moment he staggered under the knowledge just as if it were the first intimation he had received of it. Then recovering himself he went to Magdalen’s bedside, and when at sight of him she stretched her arms towards him and begged him to release her head, he bent over her as a brother might and took her aching head upon his broad chest and held it between his hands, and soothed and quieted her until she fell away to sleep. Very carefully he laid her back upon the pillow, and then meeting in Frank’s eye what seemed to be reproach for the liberty he had taken, he said to him in an aside, “You need not be jealous of your old uncle, boy. Let me help you nurse Magda as if she was my sister. She is going to be very sick.” Frank had never distrusted Roger and he believed him now, and all through the long, dreary weeks when Magdalen lay at the very gates of death, and it sometimes seemed to those who watched her as if she had entered the unknown world, he never lost faith in the man who stood by her so constantly, partly because he could not leave her, and partly because she would not let him go. She got her _head_ at last from between the boards, but it was Roger who released it for her, and with a rain of tears, she cried, “It’s out; I shall be better now;” then, lying back among her pillows, she fell into the quietest, most refreshing sleep she had known for weeks. The fever was broken, the doctor said, though it might be days before her reason was restored, and weeks before she could be moved, except with the greatest care. When the danger was over and he knew she would live, Roger absented himself from the sick-room, where he was no longer needed. She did not call for him now; she did not talk at all, but lay perfectly passive and quiet, receiving her medicines from one as readily as from another, and apparently taking no notice of anything transpiring around her. But she was decidedly better, and knowing this Roger busied himself with the settlement of his affairs, as he wished to leave Millbank as soon as possible. CHAPTER XXX. LEAVING MILLBANK.