He was that minority of one who would rather have remained in the coach—that is, if Miss Margaret had done likewise; he would not in the least have objected to Mr. Samuel Erin getting out. A circumstance over which he had no control, the fact of his having been born half a century too early, prevented his being acquainted with the poem in which Mr. Thomas Moore describes the pleasure he felt in travelling in a stage-coach with a fair companion; but he had experienced it all the same. He was not displeased that there was another stage to come yet. If he was satisfied, however, with the opportunities that had been afforded to him of making himself agreeable to Miss Margaret on the road, he must have been a man thankful for small mercies. She had given him very little encouragement. His attempts to engage her in conversation had been anything but successful. When a young lady wishes to be tender, we know that the mere offer to open or shut a coach window for her may lead to volumes of small-talk, but nothing had come of his little politenesses beyond the bare acknowledgment of them. Even that, however, was something. An ‘I thank you, sir,’ from the pretty lips of Margaret Slade was to Mr. Frank Dennis more than the acceptance of plan, elevation, and section of any proposed town-hall from a municipal council. It is strange how much harder is the heart of the female than the male under certain circumstances. If a young lady obviously endeavours to make herself agreeable to a young gentleman, he never repulses her, or at least I have never known an instance of it. ‘But suppose,’ I hear some fair one inquire, ‘he should be engaged to be married to some one else?’ ‘Madam,’ I reply to that imaginary questioner, ‘it would not make one halfpennyworth of difference. If the other young woman was not there, you would never guess from his behaviour that she was in existence.’