If the stranger had not been interested before, he was now, and he went close to the stone where Jessie’s name was cut, and stood there for a moment without saying a word to the little girl at his side. His back was toward her, and she could not see his face until he turned to her again, and said,— “And you live there at Millbank, where—where Mrs. Irving did. You certainly could not have been there when she died.” Magdalen colored scarlet, and stood staring at him with those bright, restless, eager eyes, which so puzzled and perplexed him. She had heard from Hester some of the particulars of her early life, while from her young girl friends she had heard a great deal more which distressed and worried her, and sent her at last to Roger for an explanation. And Roger, thinking it was best to do so, had told her the whole truth, and given into her keeping the locket which she had worn about her neck, and the dress in which she came to Millbank. She was old enough to understand in part her true position, and she was very sensitive with regard to her early history. That there was something wrong about both her parents, she knew; but still there was a warm, tender spot in her heart for her mother, who, Roger had said, bent over her with a kiss and a few whispered words of affection, ere abandoning her in the cars. Magdalen could sometimes feel that kiss upon her cheek and see the restless, burning eyes which Roger described so minutely. There was a look like them in her own eyes, and she was glad of it, and glad her hair was dark and glossy, as Roger said her mother’s was. She was proud to look _like_ her mother; though she was not proud _of_ her mother, and she never mentioned her to any one save Roger, or alluded to the time when she had been deserted. So when the stranger’s words seemed to ask how long she had been at Millbank, she hesitated, and at last replied: “Of course I was not born when Mrs. Irving died. I’m only twelve years old. I was a poor little girl, with nobody to care for me, and Mr. Roger took me to live with him. He is not very old, though. He is only twenty-six; and his nephew Frank is twenty-one in August.” The stranger smiled upon the quaint, old-fashioned little girl, whose eyes, fastened so curiously upon him, made him slightly uneasy. “Magdalen,” he said at last, but more as if speaking to himself and repeating a name which had once been familiar to him. “What, sir?” was Magdalen’s reply, which recalled him back to the present. He must say something to her, and so he asked: “Who gave you the name of Magdalen? It is a very pretty name.” There was a suavity and winning graciousness in his manner, which, young as she was, Magdalen felt, and it inclined her to be more familiar and communicative than she would otherwise have been to a stranger. “It was _her_ second name,” she said, touching the word Jessie on the marble. “And Mr. Roger gave it to me when I went to live with him.”