No nightingale yet lifted up his voice and poured forth his fervent appeal, but a whole chorus of thrushes and blackbirds spoke and answered in their hearts’ content. Occasionally the continuous gurgle of the water was broken and accentuated by the leap of a trout or the splash of a water-rat. Oliver looked and listened in silence for some time, turning his face to the sunset light. Then he suddenly, and as it were, involuntarily, took off his cap, and the radiance about his head brought out threads of chestnut and gold in his brown hair. He drew a long breath—a kind of sighing heigho! as with a depth of enjoyment that by reason of its very depth had a strain of sadness in it, because of the shallowness and transitoriness of all human pleasure, and then announced, confidentially, that people ought not to boast, but he believed Friarton Mill in its own peculiar line beat England, beat Europe hollow for beauty. ‘Yes, it is beautiful here,’ said Fan, quietly, with her eyes turning naturally to the pillars and arcades of that unfortunate Italian front to Copley Grange, seen at the end of the vista directly opposite the mill. ‘I know judges object to the house, and Mr. Ayott cannot bear it. If he had money enough he would pull it down and begin rebuilding to-morrow. They know best, no doubt, and I am prepared to be told it is bad taste in me, but the house always strikes me as stately and imposing.’ ‘I was not thinking of the house,’ said Oliver; ‘but I don’t see why it should not be allowed a sort of English classicism, though of course its Italian classicism is humbug here. It is not without associations,—calls up George Lord Lyttelton and Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets.”’ ‘Not to me,’ said honest Fan; ‘but I wonder,’ she persisted, sticking to her idea, and desiring, without changing the conversation abruptly, and putting a point-blank question with brutal plainness, to lead the talk to the great point with which she began to think Oliver was dallying, seeking to keep it in the background, ‘I wonder you are so little critical of Copley Grange and so much in love with Friarton Mill after you have been at Oxford.’