“Oh, Mr. Irving, how good you are to me! what can I do to show that I appreciate your kindness?” Roger had managed to have the piano brought to the house while she was away, intending it as a surprise, and he enjoyed it thoroughly, and thought how beautiful she was, with those tear-drops glittering in her great dark eyes. She was one of whom any parent might be proud, and he was proud of her, and called himself her father, and tried to believe that he felt toward her as a father would feel toward his daughter; but somehow that little episode down by the river, when she had knelt before him, with her hands upon his arm, and her flushed, eager face so near to his, had stirred a new set of feelings in his heart and made him, for the first time in his life, averse to being addressed by her as “Mr. Irving.” And when she asked him what she could do to show how glad she was, he said, “I know you are glad,—I can see it in your eyes, and I want nothing in return, unless, indeed, you drop the formal title of Mr. Irving, and give me the more familiar one of Roger. Couldn’t you do that, Magda?” Magdalen would as soon have thought of calling the clergyman of the parish by his first name, as to have addressed her guardian as Roger,—and she shook her head laughingly. “No, Mr. Irving, you can never be Roger to me,—it would bring you too much on a level with Frank, and that I should not like.” Perhaps Roger was not altogether displeased with her answer, for he smiled kindly upon her, and asked if he would have to fall very far to reach his nephew’s level. “In some respects, yes,” was Magdalen’s reply, as she commenced a brilliant polka which brought Frank himself into the parlor, followed by his mother, who kissed Magdalen lovingly, and then stood with both her hands folded on the young girl’s shoulder as she went on playing one piece after another, and making such melody as had not been heard since the days when Jessie was queen of Millbank and played in the twilight for her gray-haired husband. Mrs. Walter Scott was very sociable and kind and conciliatory, and lavish of her praises of Millbank, which she admired so much, saying she was half sorry she came, as it would be so hard to go back to her close, hot rooms in New York. Then she said she expected to have her house on her hands altogether, as her tenants were intending to go South in November, and how she should live without the rent she did not know.