This was one of the instances of natural antipathy and comparatively causeless dislike, which, like the opposite examples of instinctive partiality, and hardly warranted attachment, were apt to hold sway over Fan Constable’s ardent, concentrated temperament. Hers was not an unjust or undisciplined character, while it was loyal to the core; but it was full of ‘likes and dislikes.’ There was nothing lymphatic or volatile about Fan, to her great loss of ease and tranquillity. If she had been put under an examination as to the provocation she had received from Mrs. Hilliard, who was Fan’s remote kinswoman and early patroness, Fan could not have given any save the pettiest reasons of which she herself would have been the first to feel ashamed. Yet her asperity where this woman was concerned amounted to rancour. Sometimes the sentiment in her own bosom struck Fan as unchristian, and being very sincere in her Christianity, she sought to qualify her enmity by solemnly assuring herself of what was the truth—that she would not injure Louisa Hilliard for the world. It was only incidentally that Catherine Hilliard came in for her share of the dislike which Fan had to Catherine’s cousin. The two younger women possessed nothing in common, but neither had they any sharp points of antagonism. If it had not been for Fan Constable’s extraordinary aversion to Mrs. Hilliard, Fan would have viewed Catherine Hilliard with simple indifference. Mrs. Hilliard and her cousin kept house together, chiefly upon Mrs. Hilliard’s income, at the ‘Meadows,’ which was at once the largest, and, though it sounds a contradiction, the cosiest, certainly the prettiest, of the villas which had sprung up on the outskirts of Friarton. The ‘Meadows,’ in fact, was more of a small country house than a villa. It entitled its occupant, unless she were a very objectionable person otherwise, to revolve in the first of the social circles—which, like the sap-rings in the trunk of a tree, divided the townspeople into various grades of enclosure. Nay, the ‘Meadows’ entitled its owner to hover on the verge, which she crossed not infrequently, of the county families. For Mrs. Hilliard was only objectionable in possessing a carelessness of mind—a rather pronounced Bohemianism. She was regardless of who took her up or who let her down, which had an effect the reverse of what some people might have expected. As she was also a lively agreeable woman, superficially refined, a well-endowed, comely widow of thirty-five years of age, who relished her freedom too keenly to have any thought of marrying again, but who kept a pleasant house and welcomed her friends to it, she was lifted clean above the ebb and flow of social fickleness; she was landed in established popularity with _carte blanche_ to do very much as she pleased, and fill up her visiting-list just as she chose.