full dress, with pearls on her beautiful neck and arms, and in her golden hair, had been taken from the parlor-wall and banished to the garret; and Jessie’s name was never spoken by the master, either to his servants or his little boy Roger, who had a dash of gold in his brown hair, and a look in his dark-blue eyes, like that which Jessie’s used to wear, when, in the long evenings before his birth, she sat with folded hands gazing into the blazing fire, as if trying to solve the dark mystery of her life, and know why her lot had been cast there at Millbank with the old man, whom she did not hate, but whom she could not love. There was a night, too, which Hester never forgot,—a night when, with nervous agony depicted in every lineament, Jessie made her swear that, come what might, she would never desert or cease to love the boy Roger, sleeping so quietly in his little crib. She was to care for him as if he were her own; to consider his interest before that of any other, and bring him up a good and noble man. That was what Jessie asked, and what Hester swore to do; and then followed swiftly terror and darkness and disgrace, and close upon their footsteps came retribution, and Jessie’s golden head was lying far beneath the sea off Hatteras’s storm-beaten shore, and Jessie’s name was rarely heard. But Hester kept her vow, and since the dreadful morning when Jessie did not answer to the breakfast call, and Jessie’s room was vacant, Roger had never wanted for a mother’s care. Hester had no children of her own, and she took him instead, petting and caring for, and scolding him as he deserved, and through all, loving him with a brooding, clinging, unselfish love, which would stop at nothing which she could make herself believe was right for her to do in his behalf. And so, when the young bride looked coldly upon him and spoke slightingly of his mother, Hester declared battle at once; and the hatchet had never been buried, for Mrs. Walter Scott, in her frequent visits to Millbank, had only deepened Hester’s first impressions of her. “A proud, stuck-up person, with no kind of reason for bein’ so except that she married one of the Irvingses,” was what Hester said of her, and this opinion was warmly seconded by Aleck, who always thought just as Hester did. Had she been Eve, and he her Adam, he would have eaten the forbidden fruit without a question as to his right to do so, just because she gave it to him, but, unlike Adam, he would not have charged the fault to her; he would have taken it upon himself, as if the idea and the act had been his alone. For Frank there was more toleration at Millbank. “He was not very bright,” Hester said; “but how could he be with such a mother? Little pimpin’, spindlin’, white-haired critter, there wasn’t half so much snap to him as there was to Roger.”