and she glanced first at them and then at the delicate slipper in the picture, and the small round waist, and pretty tucked skirt, and then, greatly to Frank’s amazement, burst into a flood of tears. “I don’t wonder you like her best,” she said, when Frank asked what was the matter. “I don’t look like that. I can’t, I haven’t any slippers, nor any muslin dress; and if I had, Hester wouldn’t let me have it tucked, it’s such hard work to iron it. Alice has a mother, I know,—a good, kind mother, to take care of her and make her look like other little girls. Oh, I wish her mother was mine, or I had one just like her.” Alas, poor Magdalen. She little guessed the truth, or dreamed how dark a shadow lay across the pathway of pretty Alice Grey. She only thought of her as handsome and graceful and happy in mother and friends, and she wept on for a moment, while Frank tried to comfort her. There was no more fishing that day, for Maggie’s head began to ache, and they went back to Millbank, across the pleasant fields, in the quiet of the summer afternoon. Frank missed Magdalen’s photograph from his table the next day, and had he been out by the little brook which ran through the grounds, he would have seen the fragments of it floating down the stream, with Magdalen standing by and watching them silently. They fished again after a day or two, and hunted in the woods and sat together beneath an old gnarled oak where Frank grew confidential, and told Magdalen of his moneyed troubles, and wondered if Roger would allow him more than five thousand when he came of age. And then he inadvertently alluded to the missing will, and told Magdalen about it, and said it might be well enough for her to hunt for it occasionally, as she had access to all parts of the house. And Magdalen promised that she would, without a thought of how the finding of it might affect Roger. She would not for the world have harmed one whom she esteemed and venerated as she did Roger, but he was across the sea, and Frank had her ear and her sympathy. It would be a fine thing to find the will, particularly as Frank had promised her a dress like Alice Grey’s and a piano, if she succeeded. Frank was not a scoundrel, as some reader may be ready to suppose. He had no idea that the finding of the will would ruin Roger. He had received no such impression from his mother. She had not thought best to tell him all she believed, and had only insinuated that the missing will was more in his favor than the one then in force. Frank wanted money,—a great deal of money, and his want was growing constantly, and so he casually recommended Magdalen to hunt for the will, and then for a time gave the subject no more thought. But not so with Magdalen. She dreamed of the will by night, and hunted for it by day, when Frank did not claim her attention, until at last Hester stumbled upon her turning over the identical barrel of papers which Mrs. Walter Scott had once looked through.