Roger was talking in sober earnest, and his arm deepened its clasp around Magda’s waist, and his lips touched the shining hair of the bowed head which drew back a moment from him, then drooped lower and lower until it rested in his bosom, as Magdalen burst into a flood of tears and sobs. For a moment she did not try to speak; then, with a desperate effort to be calm, she lifted up her head and burst out with, “I never got your letter, never knew it was written until a few weeks ago. Father kept it. Forgive him, Roger; remember he was my father, and he is dead,” she cried vehemently, as she saw the dark frown gathering on Roger’s face. Yes, he was her father, and he was dead, and that kept Roger from cursing the man who had wronged him in his childhood, through his mother, and touched him still closer in his later manhood, by keeping him so long from Magdalen. “Father told me at the last,” Magdalen said. “He was sorry he kept it, and he bade me tell you so. He did not dislike _you_. It was the name, the association; and he hoped I might forget you, but I didn’t. I have remembered you all through the long years since that dreadful day when I found the will, and it hurt me so to think you wanted me to marry Frank. That was the hardest of all.” “But you know better now. I told you in my letter of Frank’s confession,” Roger said, and Magdalen replied, “Yes, I know better now. Everything is clear, else I had never come here to bring you Millbank, and—and, myself, if you will take me. Will you, Roger? It is leap year, you know. I have a right to ask.” She spoke playfully, and her eyes looked straight into his own, while for answer he took her in his arms, and kissed her forehead and lips and hair, and she felt that he was praying silently over her, thanking Heaven for this precious gift which had come to him at last. Then he spoke to her and said, “I take you, Magda, willingly, gladly; oh how gladly Heaven only knows, and as I cannot well take you without the incumbrance of Millbank, I accept that, too; and darling, though this may not be the time to say it, there has already been so much of business and money and lands mixed up with our love, that I may, I am sure, tell you I am able of myself to buy the mill in Belvidere and the site of the old shoe-shop. Frank wanted me to do it, and I put him off with saying I would wait until I knew who was to live at Millbank. I know now,” and again he rained his kisses upon the face of her who was to be his wife and the undisputed mistress, as he was the master, of Millbank. A long time they talked together of the past, which now seemed to fade away so fast in the blissful joy of the present; and Magdalen told him of little Roger Irving, whose godmother she was, and of her mother and Alice, and the home at Beechwood, where Guy Seymour’s family would continue to live.