‘I can only say that he never breathed a word of doubt to me, uncle.’
‘Nor to me, yet I know he harboured doubts,’ was the confident reply. ‘He stuck to them even after Sir Frederick found out the quintin on the seals.’
‘Still, it’s only a matter of opinion, uncle.’
‘Opinion! it’s what the believers in the Scarlet Woman call inveterate contumacy—they used to burn people for it.’
‘Well, but you don’t agree with them, you know,’ smiled Margaret. ‘You were always a stickler for the rights of private judgment.’
The antiquary shook his head and pursed his lips, the only reply possible to him under the circumstances; he could not say, ‘But when I mean private judgment, I mean the judgment that coincides with my private views.’
‘Perhaps I have been a little hard on him, Maggie, and that is what keeps him away. I wish he were back again.’
This confession from the mouth of such a man was pathetic. What it conveyed, as Margaret partly guessed, was, that in the crowd of flatterers and secret detractors by whom her uncle was surrounded he felt the loss of his honest, if somewhat too outspoken, friend. She felt remorse too, as well as compunction, for in her heart she suspected that she herself was the cause of Frank’s absence.
He had doubtless noticed the changed relations between herself and William Henry, and withdrawn himself, but without a word of complaint, from her society. He recognised the right she had to choose for herself, nor did he grudge her the happiness she found in her choice, but he could not endure the contemplation of it. It was out of the question, of course, that she should reveal this to Mr. Erin; but she was too straightforward to corroborate a view of the matter which she knew to be incorrect.
‘I don’t think Frank is one, uncle, to take offence at anything you may have said to him about the Deed. He is too sensible—I mean,’ she added with the haste of one who withdraws his foot from a precipice, ‘his nature is too generous to harbour offence.’