During the entire summer Roger remained at Millbank, where he made a few changes, both in the grounds and in the house, which began to wear a more modern look than during the old squire’s life. Some of the shrubbery was rooted up, and a few of the oldest trees cut down, so that the sunshine could find freer access to the rooms, which had rarely been used since Jessie went away, but which Roger opened to the warmth and sunlight of summer. On the wall, in the library, Jessie’s picture was hung. It had been retouched and brightened up in Springfield, and the beautiful face always seemed to smile a welcome on Roger whenever he came where it was. On the monument in the graveyard Jessie’s name was cut beneath her husband’s, and every Saturday Roger carried a bouquet of flowers from the Millbank garden, and laid it on the grassy mound, in memory, not so much of his father, as of the young mother whose grave was in the sea. Thither he sometimes brought little Magdalen, who could walk quite easily now, and it was not an uncommon sight, on pleasant summer days, to see the boy seated under the evergreens which overshadowed his father’s grave, while toddling among the gray head-stones of the dead, or playing in the gravel-walks, was Magdalen, with her blanket pinned about her neck, and her white sun-bonnet tied beneath her chin. Thus the summer passed, and in the autumn Roger went away to Andover, where he was to finish preparing for college, instead of returning to his old tutor in St. Louis. After his departure, the front rooms above and below were closed, and Magdalen, who took more kindly to the parlors than to the kitchen, was taught that such things were only for her when Master Roger was at home; and if, by chance, she stole through an open door into the forbidden rooms, she was brought back at once to her corner in the kitchen. Not roughly though, for Hester Floyd was always kind to the child,—first, for Roger’s sake, and then for the affection she herself began to feel for the little one, whose beauty, and bright, pretty ways everybody praised. And now, while the doors and shutters of Millbank are closed, and only the rear portion of the building is open, we pass, without comment, over a period of eleven years, and open the story again, on a bright day in summer, when the sky was as blue and the air as bland as was the air and sky of Italy, where Roger Irving was travelling. CHAPTER VIII. THE STRANGER IN BELVIDERE.