him with outspread arms, and with a lightness and gaiety which made him loathe her, even while it allured him.  But the impression of this figure of Margaret—­with all Margaret’s character taken out of it, as completely as if some evil spirit had got possession of her form—­was so deeply stamped upon his imagination, that when he wakened he felt hardly able to separate the Una from the Duessa; and the dislike he had to the latter seemed to envelope and disfigure the former Yet he was too proud to acknowledge his weakness by avoiding the sight of her.  He would neither seek an opportunity of being in her company nor avoid it.  To convince himself of his power of self-control, he lingered over every piece of business this afternoon; he forced every movement into unnatural slowness and deliberation; and it was consequently past eight o’clock before he reached Mr. Hale’s.  Then there were business arrangements to be transacted in the study with Mr. Bell; and the latter kept on, sitting over the fire, and talking wearily, long after all business was transacted, and when they might just as well have gone upstairs.  But Mr. Thornton would not say a word about moving their quarters; he chafed and chafed, and thought Mr. Bell a most prosy companion; while Mr. Bell returned the compliment in secret, by considering Mr. Thornton about as brusque and curt a fellow as he had ever met with, and terribly gone off both in intelligence and manner.  At last, some slight noise in the room above suggested the desirableness of moving there.  They found Margaret with a letter open before her, eagerly discussing its contents with her father.  On the entrance of the gentlemen, it was immediately put aside; but Mr. Thornton’s eager senses caught some few words of Mr. Hale’s to Mr. Bell.

‘A letter from Henry Lennox.  It makes Margaret very hopeful.’

Mr. Bell nodded.  Margaret was red as a rose when Mr. Thornton looked at her.  He had the greatest mind in the world to get up and go out of the room that very instant, and never set foot in the house again.

‘We were thinking,’ said Mr. Hale, ’that you and Mr. Thornton had taken Margaret’s advice, and were each trying to convert the other, you were so long in the study.’

’And you thought there would be nothing left of us but an opinion, like the Kilkenny cat’s tail.  Pray whose opinion did you think would have the most obstinate vitality?’

Mr. Thornton had not a notion what they were talking about, and disdained to inquire.  Mr. Hale politely enlightened him.

’Mr. Thornton, we were accusing Mr. Bell this morning of a kind of Oxonian mediaeval bigotry against his native town; and we—­Margaret, I believe—­suggested that it would do him good to associate a little with Milton manufacturers.’

’I beg your pardon.  Margaret thought it would do the Milton manufacturers good to associate a little more with Oxford men.  Now wasn’t it so, Margaret?’