This was Roger’s letter, over which Magdalen wept tears of pain, mingled with tears of joy,—joy, that he loved her still,—for only in that way could she construe some portions of his letter; and pain that he should write as if all intercourse between them was necessarily at an end; that he was probably never to see her; she never to go to Schodick, when she had within the last few days thought so much about it, and planned how she could, perhaps, get her father and Alice to go with her, and thus show Roger to them. That plan had failed, that castle fallen, and Magdalen wept its fall, wondering what had come over Roger, and what he meant by some portions of his letter. She did not know how, for a moment, Roger had writhed under the knowledge that she was the daughter of Arthur Grey; or how the fact had seemed at once to build an iron wall between him and the girl he loved better than his life. Then, just as he was recovering from the first great shock, and hope was beginning to make itself heard again, Guy had unwittingly put his oar into the troubled waters, and made them ten times worse. In his enthusiasm about Magdalen, whom he extolled as all that was lovely and desirable, he gave Roger the impression that between himself and Magdalen there already existed an intimacy which would ripen into relations of a closer nature than mere friends. And Roger listened to him with a face which told no tales, and a heart which throbbed with jealousy and pain; and then, feeling that he must know something definite, said to him, just as he was leaving: “Excuse me, Mr. Seymour, if I seem impertinent. From what you have said, I gather that you hope, one day, to be more to Mr. Grey than his sister’s nephew.” And Guy, thinking only of Alice at that moment, had replied: “You are something of a Yankee, I _guess_. But you are right in your conjectures. I do hope to be more to Mr. Grey than his sister’s nephew; but there’s no telling. Girls are riddles, you know.” And then good-natured, kind-hearted Guy had gone his way, leaving in Roger’s mind an impression which drifted his life farther and farther away from Magdalen, whose heart went out after him now with a stronger desire than it had ever known before. CHAPTER XLVI. THE CLOUDS BREAK OVER BEECHWOOD.