There were two or three trips to New York, and two or three milliners and dressmakers’ bills paid and receipted and said nothing about. There were also bundles and bundles of dry goods forwarded to Millbank, from Stewart’s, and Arnold’s, and Hearne’s, and one would have supposed that Magdalen was a young lady just making her _débût_ into fashionable society, instead of a little girl of twelve going away to school. The receipted bills of said bundles were all scrupulously sent across the water to Roger, to whom Mrs. Walter Scott wrote a very friendly letter, begging pardon for the liberty she had taken of going to his house uninvited, but expressing herself as so lonely and tired of the hot city, and so anxious to visit the haunt sacred to her for the sake of her dear husband, Roger’s only brother. Then she spoke of Magdalen in the highest terms of praise, and said she had taken it upon herself to see that she was properly fitted out, and as Roger, being a bachelor, was not expected to know how much was actually required nowadays for a young miss’s wardrobe, she sent him the bills that he might know what she was getting, and stop her if she was too extravagant. This was her first letter, to which Roger returned a very gracious answer, thanking her for her interest in Magdalen, expressing himself as glad that she was at Millbank, asking her to prolong her visit as long as she found it agreeable, and saying he was not very likely to quarrel about the bills, as he had very little idea of the cost of feminine apparel. Roger was not naturally suspicious, and it never occurred to him in glancing over the bills to wonder what a child of twelve could do with fifteen yards of blue silk or three yards of velvet. For aught he knew, blue silk and black silk and velvet were as appropriate for Magdalen as the merinos and Scotch plaids, and delaines and French calicoes, and ginghams, and little striped crimson and black silk which the lady purchased for Magdalen at reduced rates, and had made up for her according to her own good taste. In Mrs. Walter Scott’s second letter she spoke of two or three other bills which she had forgotten to enclose in her last, and which were now mislaid so that she could not readily find them. The amount was a little over one hundred dollars, and she mentioned it so that he might know just what disposition was made of his check while the money was in her hands. Then it _did_ occur to Roger that Magdalen must be having a wonderful outfit, and for a moment a distrust of Mrs. Walter Scott flashed across his mind. But he quickly put it by as unworthy of him, and by way of making amends for the distrust, sent to the lady herself his check for one hundred dollars, which she was to accept for her kindness to Magdalen. Mrs. Walter Scott was in the seventh heaven of happiness, and petted Magdalen more than ever, and confirmed old Hester in her belief that “she had joined the church or met with a great change.”