He knew now how it came to be mailed in New York, and shuddered as he read again the postscript, written by a stranger, who said that a few hours after Jessie’s letter was finished, a fire had broken out and spread so rapidly that all communication with the life-boats was cut off, and escape seemed impossible; that in the moment of peril Jessie had come to him with the letter, which she asked him to take, and if he escaped alive, to send to Millbank with the news of her death. She also wished him to add that, so far as _he_ was concerned, what she had written was true; which he accordingly did, as he could “not do otherwise than obey the commands of one so lovely as Mrs. Irving.” “Curse him; curse that man!” Roger said, between his teeth, as he read the unfeeling lines; and then, in fancy, he saw the dreadful scene: the burning ship, the fearful agony of the doomed passengers, while amid it all his mother’s golden hair, and white, beautiful face appeared, as she stood before her betrayer, and charged him to send her dying message to Millbank if he escaped and she did not. It was an hour from the time Roger entered the room before he went out, and in that hour he seemed to himself to have grown older by years than he was before he knew so much of his mother and had read her benediction. “She was pure and good, let others believe as they may, and I will honor her memory and try to be what I know she would like to have me,” he said to Hester when he met her alone, and she asked him what he had learned of his mother. Hester had read the letter when she found it. It was not in her nature to refrain, and she, too had fully exonerated Jessie and cursed the man who had followed her, even to her husband’s side, with his alluring words. But she would rather that Roger should not know of the liberty she had taken, and so she said nothing of having read the letter first, especially as he did not offer to show it to her. There was a clause in what the bad man had written which might be construed into a doubt of some portions of Jessie’s story, and Roger understood it; and, while it only deepened his hatred of the man, instead of shaking his confidence in his mother, he resolved that no eye but his own should ever see the whole of that letter. But he showed Hester the curl of hair, and asked if it was like his mother’s; and then, drawing her into the library, questioned her minutely with regard to the past. And Hester told him all she thought best of his mother’s life at Millbank;—of the scene in the bridal chamber, when she wept so piteously and said, “I did not want to come here;”—of the deep sadness in her beautiful face, which nothing could efface;—of her utter indifference to the homage paid her by the people of Belvidere, or the costly presents heaped upon her by her husband.