He took from his pocket one of the printed cards which were now formally issued to purchasers of the lately published volume for leave to examine the manuscripts. SHAKESPEARE. Admit Albany Wallis, a subscriber, to view the papers. ‘Think of Mr. Wallis having bought the book! Malone and he have quarrelled about it, it seems.’ ‘Not about the book,’ put in Margaret quietly; ‘I am afraid he is not even yet a true believer, but I like him better for having bought the book than even if he were. He felt he had behaved badly to us when he came here with that wretched Mr. Talbot, and his purchase of it was by way of making some amends. Where he differed from Mr. Malone was about the John Hemynge deed you brought from the Temple; Mr. Malone has had the malevolence to stigmatise even that as a forgery; but, as Mr. Wallis points out, since you were away from Norfolk Street only three-quarters of an hour, such a fraud was impossible and out of the question. He is a just man with a mind open to conviction, and he has had the courage to confess himself in the wrong.’ ‘Whoever told you all this?’ inquired William Henry in amazement. ‘A person who is no friend of his, but, like him, has a generous nature.’ ‘Methinks you do protest too much,’ observed the young man drily. ‘No one was saying anything against your informant, who it was easy to perceive was Mr. Frank Dennis. I thought he had literally withdrawn his countenance from us of late, as he has done long ago in another sense.’ ‘No one can control his own opinions, Willie,’ said Margaret gently. ‘I have heard you yourself say a hundred times, concerning this very matter, that every one had a right to them, but, since the very knowledge of Frank’s entertaining certain views (though he never expressed them except upon compulsion) was an annoyance to my uncle, he thought it better to absent himself.’ ‘But still you meet him elsewhere?’ ‘I met him in the street the other day by accident. He gave me, it is true, the information I have just given to you, but he did not volunteer it. It was I who spoke to him first about Mr. Wallis.’ ‘It seems he took great care to undeceive you as to that gentleman’s having any belief in me.’ ‘In _you_, Willie? We never even spoke of _you_.’ This was very true: he had become a subject to which, for Frank’s sake, she never alluded in Frank’s presence. ‘Well, of course I am not responsible for the manuscripts; but do you suppose that Dennis was thinking of them, for which he does not care one farthing, even if he was talking of them? He was thinking of _me_. When he depreciates them to you he depreciates me; when he quotes the opinion of Mr. Wallis or of any one else he is quoting it against me. You need not blush, Margaret, as if my mind had just awakened to a suspicion of the truth. Do you suppose I don’t know what Mr. Frank Dennis has been after, all along?’