Jack Dadd was not unwilling to be seen walking along the High Street with Constable of Friarton Mill, late of St. Bodolph’s, Oxford University, or standing with him at their respective shop-doors. Jack went farther: he slapped his old school-fellow and brother-tradesman on the shoulder at parting with a resounding slap, which Oliver bore unflinchingly, though he did not return it. The young draper addressed the miller and baker as ‘Noll,’ in the hearing of the Polley girls, and Oliver answered cheerfully the free abbreviation of his Christian name; yet, though Oliver was anxiously wary in his intercourse with Jack, and scrupulously avoided the most distant reference to printed matter which was not in the ‘Friarton News,’ all the same, Jack had continually present to him his own literary deficiencies, especially in the rudimentary branches of grammar and spelling. What was lacking in the last might have escaped detection for the present, but the culprit had a guilty conviction that Constable would somehow guess that he—Jack—was never sure in writing a letter when he ought or ought not to double his consonants, or to introduce an _e_ after a _b_ or an _l_ or a _t_. And Jack had an inward uncomfortable impression that a college swell must look down upon him for such a weakness; even though Constable might be a big enough swell, or a sufficiently artful dodger, not to brandish his superior advantages in Jack’s face. It is by no means pleasant to be haunted by a sense of inferiority even in so small a matter. And Jack Dadd was not accustomed to submit to such an experience. Till Oliver came home, Jack had swaggered and crowed a good deal over the young men of his class in Friarton and the neighbourhood. Old Dadd was well-to-do, and Jack was an only child. Of course he was not like an ordinary young man in the drapery line to which he had been bred. He was the young master and successor to a good business. But now Jack Dadd began to fear that Oliver Constable—queer fish and out of the water as he was—would cut Jack out with some of his most ardent admirers. In taking up his father’s trade Oliver had still retained his reputation for wonderful cleverness and learning, above all for that swell’s tone of consideration, tolerance, and gentleness which qualified Constable’s bluntest ways, and of which none had a keener perception than poor Jack, who lacked it utterly. Girls were so foolish and vain, always caught by novelty and gentility. No doubt Oliver Constable was not a gentleman born, any more than the rest of them could boast of being lords’ and squires’ sons. What was more, he had farther diminished his claims to being a gentleman by choosing to work—at least to have a mill and a bakehouse and shop, instead of to live idle and take his pleasure out of the fortune old Constable had left, as Jack felt certain he would have done in Oliver’s place.