“It’s gone to his head a little bit—­only natural,” Horace reflected as he went down the stairs.  “He’s probably just feeding on what folks think of it.  As if it mattered a pin’s head what Octavius Milburn thinks or don’t think!”

Lorne, however, left alone with his customs returns and his immigration reports, sat still, attaching a weight quite out of comparison with a pin’s head to Mr Milburn’s opinion.  He turned it over and over, instead of the tabulated figures that were his business:  he had to show himself his way to the conclusion that such a thing could not matter seriously in the end, since Milburn hadn’t a dollar involved—­it would be different if he were a shareholder in the Maple Line.  He wished heartily, nevertheless, that he could demonstrate a special advantage to boiler-makers in competitive freights with New York.  What did they import, confound them!  Pig-iron?  Plates and rivets?  Fortunately he was in a position to get at the facts, and he got at them with an interest of even greater intensity than he had shown to the whole question since ten that morning.  Even now, the unprejudiced observer, turning up the literature connected with the Cruickshank deputation, may notice a stress laid upon the advantages to Canadian importers of ore in certain stages of manufacture which may strike him as slightly, very slightly, special.  Of course there are a good many of them in the country.  So that Mr Horace Williams was justified to some extent in his kindly observation upon the excusable egotism of youth.  Two or three letters, however, came in while Lorne was considering the relation of plates and rivets to the objects of his deputation.  They were all congratulatory; one was from the chairman of the Liberal Association at its headquarters in Toronto.  Lorne glanced at them and stowed them away in his pocket.  He would read them when he got home, when it would be a pleasure to hand them over to his mother.  She was making a collection of them.

He had a happy perception that same evening that Mr Milburn’s position was not, after all, finally and invincibly taken against the deputation and everything —­everybody—­concerned with it.  He met that gentleman at his own garden gate.  Octavius paused in his exit, to hold it open for young Murchison, thus even assisting the act of entry, a thing which thrilled Lorne sweetly enough when he had time to ponder its possible significance.  Alas! the significance that lovers find!  Lorne read a world in the behaviour of Dora’s father in holding the gate open.  He saw political principle put aside in his favour, and social position forgotten in kindness to him.  He saw the gravest, sincerest appreciation of his recent success, which he took as humbly as a dog will take a bone; he read a fatherly thought at which his pulses bounded in an arrogance of triumph, and his heart rose to ask its trust.  And Octavius Milburn had held the gate open because it was more convenient to hold it open than to leave