“Thunder!” Frank exclaimed, “have you been so deceived all this time, and is that the cause of those white hairs in your whiskers, and that crow-foot around your eyes? Roger, you are a bigger fool than I am, and Bell has many a time proved to me conclusively that I am a big one. It is _Alice_, not Magdalen, who is Mrs. Guy Seymour. They were married very quietly at home; no wedding, no cards, on account of the mother’s recent death. I know it is so, for I saw the happy pair with my own eyes just before they sailed. So what more proof will you have?” Roger needed none, and Frank could almost see the wrinkles fading out of his face, and the light coming back to his eyes, as he tried to stammer out something about its being strange that he was so deceived. Looking at his uncle, now, and remembering all the past, there came again across Frank the resolution to make a clean breast of what should have been told long ago, and after a moment’s hesitancy he began: “Roger, old chap, there are things I could tell you if I wasn’t afraid you’d hate me all your life. I b’lieve I’ll take the risk any way, and out with the whole of it.” “I promise not to hate you. What is it?” Roger asked, and Frank continued, “Magdalen always loved _you_, and you were blind not to have seen it. You thought too little of yourself, and so fell into the snare laid for you. Mother knew she loved you, and then got you to assent to my addressing her, and I used you as an argument why she should listen to me, and it almost killed her, as you would have known had you seen her face.” “What do you mean? I don’t think you make it quite clear,” Roger asked, in a trembling voice; and then as well as he could Frank made it clear, and told of the ways and means he had resorted to in order to win Magdalen, who, through all, showed how her whole heart was given to Roger. “If you had seen her in the garret, rocking back and forth, and moaning your name, and seen how she started from me when I said if she would marry me I would burn the will and never speak of it, you would have no doubt of her love for you.” “Frank, you have wronged me! oh, you have wronged me terribly!” Roger said, and his voice was hoarse with emotion. “Millbank was nothing to this; but go on, tell the whole; keep nothing from me.” And Frank went on, and told the whole which the reader already knows of his efforts to deceive both Roger and Magdalen, whom he had succeeded in separating. “And were you never engaged?” Roger asked. And Frank answered him: