AT BEECHWOOD 325 XLVI. THE CLOUDS BREAK OVER BEECHWOOD 333 XLVII. BELL BURLEIGH 337 XLVIII. THE WEDDING, AND HESTER FLOYD’S ACCOUNT OF IT 345 XLIX. HOW THEY LIVED AT MILLBANK 354 L. ROGER 362 LI. MAGDALEN IS COMING HOME 369 LII. MILLBANK IS SOLD AT AUCTION 373 LIII. MAGDALEN AT ROGER’S HOME 378 LIV. ROGER AND MAGDALEN 382 LV. MILLBANK IS CLEAR OF ITS OLD TENANTS 388 LVI. THE BRIDAL 391 LVII. CHRISTMAS-TIDE 395 MILLBANK; OR, ROGER IRVING’S WARD. CHAPTER I. EXPECTING ROGER. Every window and shutter at Millbank was closed. Knots of crape were streaming from the bell-knobs, and all around the house there was that deep hush which only the presence of death can inspire. Indoors there was a kind of twilight gloom pervading the rooms, and the servants spoke in whispers whenever they came near the chamber where the old squire lay in his handsome coffin, waiting the arrival of Roger, who had been in St. Louis when his father died, and who was expected home on the night when our story opens. Squire Irving had died suddenly in the act of writing to his boy Roger, and when found by old Aleck, his hand was grasping the pen, and his head was resting on the letter he would never finish. “Heart disease” was the verdict of the inquest, and then the electric wires carried the news of his decease to Roger, and to the widow of the squire’s eldest son, who lived on Lexington avenue, New York, and who always called herself Mrs. Walter Scott Irving, fancying that in some way the united names of two so illustrious authors as Irving and Scott shed a kind of literary halo upon one who bore them. Mrs. Walter Scott Irving had been breakfasting in her back parlor when the news came to her of her father-in-law’s sudden death, and to say that she was both astonished and shocked, is only to do her justice, but to insinuate that she was sorry, is quite another thing. She was not sorry, though her smooth white brow contracted into wrinkles, and she tried to speak very sadly and sorrowfully as she said to her son Frank, a boy of nine or more,— “Frank, your grandfather is dead; poor man, you’ll never see him again.”