This letter, which reached Magdalen the night preceding the examination, awoke within her a feeling of uneasiness and disquiet. She had been always more or less afraid of Roger, and she was especially so now that she had not seen him for more than eight years, and he would undoubtedly expect so much from her as a graduate and a young lady of eighteen. She almost wished he would stay in Europe, or that she had some other home than Millbank. It would not be half so pleasant with the master there, as it used to be in other days when she was a little girl fishing with Frank in the river, or hunting with him in the woods. Frank would be at Millbank, too, it was true; but the travelled Frank, who spoke French like a native, was very different from the Frank of five years ago, and Magdalen dreaded him almost as much as she dreaded Roger himself, wondering if he would tease her as he used to do, and if he would think her improved and at all like Alice Grey, whom she knew he had met again at the “Piccola Sentinella.” “I wish they would stay abroad five years more,” she thought, as she finished reading Frank’s letter; and her cheeks grew so hot and red, and her pulse beat so rapidly, that it was long after midnight ere she could quiet herself for the rest she would need on the morrow, when she was to act so conspicuous a part. CHAPTER XIV. IN THE EVENING. Magdalen was very beautiful in her white, fleecy dress, which swept backward with as broad and graceful a sweep as ever Mrs. Walter Scott’s had done when she walked the halls at Millbank. There were flowers on her bosom, knots of flowers on her short sleeves, and flowers in her wavy hair, which was arranged in heavy coils about her head, with one or two curls falling behind her ears. She knew she was handsome; she had been told that too often not to know it; while had there been no other means of knowledge within her reach, her mirror would have set her right. But Magdalen was not vain, and there was not the slightest tinge of self-consciousness in her manner as she went through the various parts assigned her during the day, and received the homage of the crowd. Once her room-mate had asked if she did not wish Mr. Irving could be present in the evening, and Magdalen had answered, “No, I would not have him here for the world. I should be sure to make a miserable failure, if I knew Mr. Irving and Frank were looking on. But there is no danger of that. They cannot have reached New York yet.” Later in the day, and just as it was growing dark, a young girl came into Magdalen’s room, talking eagerly of “the two most splendid-looking men she had ever seen.” “They came,” she said, “out of the hotel and walked before me all the way, looking hard at the seminary as they passed it. I wonder who they were. Both were handsome, and one was perfectly splendid.”