He did not comprehend her clearly, but the thought that his grandfather’s death did not necessarily mean banishment from Millbank helped to dry his eyes, and he began to whistle merrily at the prospect of going there at once, for they were to start that very day on the three-o’clock train. “It was better to be on the ground as soon as possible,” Mrs. Walter Scott reflected, and after a visit to her dressmaker, who promised that the deepest of mourning suits should follow her, she started with Frank for Millbank. Mrs. Walter Scott Irving had never been a favorite at Millbank since her husband had taken her there as a bride, and she had given mortal offence to the two real heads of the household, Aleck and Hester Floyd, by putting on all sorts of airs, snubbing little Roger, and speaking of his mother as “that low creature, whose disgraceful conduct could never be excused.” Hester Floyd, to whom this was said, could have forgiven the airs; indeed, she rather looked upon them as belonging by right to one who was so fortunate as to marry into the Irving family. But when it came to slighting little Roger for his mother’s error, and to speaking of that mother as a “low creature,” Hester’s hot blood was roused, and there commenced at once a quiet, unspoken warfare, which had never ceased, between herself and the offending Mrs. Walter Scott. Hester was as much a part of Millbank as the stately old trees in the park, a few of which she had helped Aleck to plant when she was a girl of eighteen and he a boy of twenty. She had lived at Millbank more than thirty years. She had come there when the first Mrs. Irving was a bride. She had carried Walter Scott to be christened. She had been his nurse, and slapped him with her shoe a dozen times. She had been married to Aleck in her mistress’s dining-room. She had seen the old house torn down, and a much larger, handsomer one built in its place; and then, just after it was completed, she had followed her mistress to the grave, and shut up the many beautiful rooms which were no longer of any use. Two years passed, and then her master electrified her one day with the news that he was about bringing a second bride to Millbank, a girl younger than his son Walter, and against whom Hester set herself fiercely as against an usurper of her rights. But when the sweet, pale-faced Jessie Morton came, with her great, sad blue eyes, and her curls of golden hair, Hester’s resentment began to give way, for she could not harbor malice toward a creature so lovely, so gentle, and so sad withal: and after an interview in the bed-chamber, when poor Jessie threw herself with a passionate cry into Hester’s arms, and sobbed piteously, “Be kind to me, won’t you? Be my friend. I have none in all the world, or I should not be here. I did not want to come,”—she became her strongest ally, and proved that Jessie’s confidence had not been misplaced. There had come a dark, dark day for Millbank since then, and Jessie’s picture, painted in