The argument was, at least, conclusive; nothing more remained to be said, or was said. Mr. Erin stalked on like a turkey-cock ruffled; his idol had been insulted, and he felt that he had done well to be angry. Every deer he saw stimulated his wrath. ‘Confound the fellow!’ he murmured as he passed the antlered herd, ‘it would serve him right if they tossed him.’ It even crossed his mind perhaps that Margaret was right after all in receiving Dennis’s attentions so coldly; that he was certainly a very pig-headed young man. Frank Dennis, too, good-natured as he was, was not a little put out. For the moment he felt almost as disrespectful towards Shakespeare as Sydney Smith’s friend was to the Equator; but his eye fell on Margaret, and he put a bridle on his tongue. His sense of annoyance soon faded away, but with the antiquary it was not so easily effaced. This incident was of considerable advantage to William Henry and his little plan. In a company of three, when one of them has fallen out of our favour, one naturally rather ‘cottons’ to the other, if it is only to show the offender what he has forfeited by his misconduct; and from thenceforward Mr. Erin showed himself at least less severe towards the young man who bore his name. Nay, what was of more consequence, the symptoms he had exhibited of favouring Frank Dennis’s pretensions to his niece’s hand manifestly slackened; he no longer troubled himself to throw the young people together. On the other hand, though of course with no idea that there was risk in it (for he both despised him and ‘despised his youth’), he suffered William Henry and Margaret to ‘foregather’ as much as they pleased. He still felt so resentful to Frank’s sacrilegious ideas as respected the customs of deer when under emotion, that it was distasteful to him to be shut up with him as a companion; and in order to mitigate his society he took an inside place for William Henry (notwithstanding that, except in the matter of MSS. and first editions, he had a frugal mind) in the coach to town. CHAPTER VII. A COLLECTOR’S GRATITUDE.