‘Any time, of course, you choose to appoint will suit my friend,’ said Talbot; ‘but, as he led me to understand, he has a matter of importance connected with the manuscripts to communicate to you, and somewhat of a private nature.’ ‘Then let him come to-morrow evening, when we shall be alone. Perhaps he would like to see William Henry.’ ‘I think he would, sir,’ returned Talbot, and as he spoke he put his hand up to his mouth, to conceal a demoniacal grin such as one sees on a gargoyle carved by the piety of some monkish architect. ‘I’ll bring him to-morrow.’ During all this time William Henry and Margaret, in the opposite corner of the arbour, had carried on a smothered conversation with one another on quite a different subject, or rather, as the manner of young people is under similar circumstances, on no subject at all. It was enough to them that their hands met under the table and their hearts met under the rose. The scene they looked upon was not more bright than their hopes, nor the music they listened to more in tune than their tender fancies. When Mr. Erin pulled out his watch and pronounced it time to set out for home, it seemed to them that they had only just arrived. As for Mr. Reginald Talbot, for the last hour or so they had been totally unconscious of his presence; but when he took his leave of them, which he did with much politeness, there was something of suppressed triumph in his voice that aroused William Henry’s suspicions. A shudder involuntarily seized him; he felt like a merrymaker at a festival who suddenly looks up into the sky, and perceives, instead of sunshine, ‘the ragged rims of thunder brooding low.’ CHAPTER XVI. A BOMBSHELL. IT was significant of the sensitiveness of Mr. Erin’s feelings in regard to his new-found treasures, though it by no means indicated any want of soundness in his faith, that he ignored as much as possible all attacks upon their authenticity. This by no means involved his shutting his eyes to them; indeed he had privately procured and read all that had been written about the MSS., even to that terrible letter of Lord Charlemont to Malone, in which he had said, ‘I am only sorry that Steevens (the rival commentator) is not the proprietor of them,’ in order (as he meant) that they might have had the additional pleasure, derived from private enmity, of exposing them. The sensations the antiquary endured from these things were something like those of Regulus rolling down a hill in his barrel stuck full of nails and knives, but he could not resist the temptation of reading them any more than a patient with hay-fever in his eyes can resist rubbing them.