When Margaret reached her breakfast-room, she found a nosegay on the table, and Mr Michael Allcraft’s card.  He had called to make enquiries at a very early hour of the morning, and had signified his intention of returning on affairs of business later in the day.  Margaret blushed deeper than the rose on which her eyes were bent, and took alarm; her first determination was to be denied to him; the second—­far more rational—­to receive him as the partner in the banking-house, to transact the necessary business, and then dismiss him as a stranger, distantly, but most politely.  This was as it should be.  Michael came.  He was more bashful than he had been the night before, and he stammered an apology for his father’s absence without venturing to look towards the individual he addressed.  He drew two chairs to the table—­one for Margaret, another for himself.  He placed them at a distance from each other, and, taking some papers from his pocket with a nervous hand, he sat down without a minute’s loss of time to look over and arrange them.  Margaret was pleased with his behaviour; she took her seat composedly, and waited for his statement.  There were a few select and favourite volumes on the table, and one of these the lady involuntarily took up and ran through, whilst Michael still continued busy with his documents, and apparently perplexed by them.  Nothing can be more ill advised than to disturb a man immersed in business with literary or any other observations foreign to his subject.

“You were speaking of Wordsworth yesterday evening, Mr Allcraft,” said Margaret suddenly—­Allcraft pushed every paper from him in a paroxysm of delight, and looked up—­“and I think we were agreed in our opinion of that great poet.  What a sweet thing is this!  Did you ever read it?  It is the sonnet on the Sonnet.”

“A gem, madam.  None but he could have written it.  The finest writer of sonnets in the world has spoken the poem’s praise with a tenderness and pathos that are inimitable.  There is the true philosophy of the heart in all he says—­a reconciliation of suffering humanity to its hard but necessary lot.  How exquisite and full of meaning are those lines—­

          ’Bees that soar for bloom,
  High as the highest peak of Furness fells,
  Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells;’

and then the touching close—­

  ’In truth, the prison unto which we doom
  Ourselves, no prison is; and hence to me,
  In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
  Within the sonnets scanty plot of ground;
  Pleased if some souls, for such there needs must be,
  Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
  Should find brief solace there as I have found.’

The weight of too much liberty.  Ah, who has not experienced this!”—­Mr Michael Allcraft sighed profoundly.  A slight pause ensued after this sudden outbreak on the part of the junior partner, and then he proceeded, his animated and handsome countenance glowing with expression as he spoke.