To Magdalen this was a new and blissful experience. At Millbank she had always been alone, so far as girls of her own age were concerned, and Alice Grey seemed to her the embodiment of all that was pure and beautiful, and she loved her with a devotion that sometimes startled herself with its intenseness. The mystery, if there was one, was very quiet now, and though Alice went often down the hall and through the green baize door, she never looked as sad and tired when she came back as she had done on that first day at Beechwood. Mr. Grey, too, frequently passed the entire evening with the young girls in the parlor, where Magdalen, who was a very fine reader, read to them aloud from Alice’s favorite authors. But after the first night she was never asked to _sing_. Alice often requested her to play, and they had learned a few duets which they practised together, but songs were never mentioned, and Magdalen would have fancied that there was something disagreeable in her voice were it not that when alone with Alice among the hills and down by the river, whither they often went, her companion always insisted upon her singing, and would sit listening to her as if spellbound by the clear, liquid tones. At last there came a letter from Hester Floyd, who, in her characteristic way, expressed herself as pleased that Magdalen “had grit enough to cut loose from the whole coboodle at Millbank, and go to do for herself. I was some taken aback,” she wrote, “for I s’posed by the tell that you was to marry that pimpin, white-faced Frank, and I must say you showed your good sense by quittin’ him, and doin’ for yourself. Me and Roger would have been glad for you to come here; that is, I _b’leeve_ Roger would, though he never sed nothin’ particklar. He’s some altered, and don’t talk so much, nor ’pear so chipper as he used to do, and I mistrust he misses _you_ more’n he does his money. He’s a good deal looked up to, both in the town and in the church, where they’ve made him a vestryman in place of a man who died, and ’twould seem as if he’d met with a change, though he allus was a good man, with no bad habits; but he’s different like now, and don’t read newspapers Sunday, nor let me get up an extra dinner, and he has family prayers, which is all well enuff, only bakin’ mornins it does hender some.” Then followed a description of the house and Schodick generally, and then a break of two days or more, after which the old lady resumed her pen, and added: “Roger’s got a letter from Frank, askin’ if he knew where you was. He said you left while he was away unbeknownst to him, and had never writ a word, by which I take it you and he ain’t on the fust ratest terms. Roger talked the most that day that he has in a month, and actually whistled, but then he’d just gained a suit, and so mabby it was that, though I b’leeve it wouldn’t do no harm if you were to drop him a line in a friendly way. It’s leap year, you know.”