Stranger still to relate, Mrs. Hilliard was too secure of her position, and too defiant of censure, to ignore for a moment the thread of relationship between herself and the Constables of Friarton Mill. On the contrary, she proclaimed it openly with evident cold blood whenever she had occasion to do so, compelling confidence and respect in her hearers. For if Mrs. Hilliard could afford to make light of, nay, to sport, her far-away cousinship to the family of a provincial miller and baker, her acquaintances might rest on the conviction that she had substantial claims on their regard in much closer alliance with the families in canons’ houses in cathedral closes, in government houses abroad, in pleasant little houses near Hyde Park or at Kensington. But in reality the eccentricity belonged rather to the idiosyncrasy of the woman than to the remoteness of the relationship which she elected to count with the Constables. Mrs. Hilliard had been ready to hold out her hand to the Constable young people, which was one of the offences Fan, though she could not dispense with the hand, had not been able to forgive. This was not pure perversity and ingratitude in Fan Constable. It was the result of the observation that Mrs. Hilliard laughed, without taking the trouble to conceal it, at Fan’s serious pretensions, and that the older woman was as little, as the younger was much, in earnest. The Meadows was a wide white house, cheerful in its whiteness, and, at the same time, amply shaded and sheltered by old and luxuriant shrubberies, of which the Portugal laurels, Irish yews and hollies were giants of their kind, while the lilacs, Guelder roses, and syringas offered, in their season, pyramids, piles, and thickets of flowers. The public rooms were all on the ground floor; and, in the case of the drawing-room, the long French windows, which faced the south, opened to the lawn with its clumps of rhododendrons and brakes of thorns, and its glimpse in mid distance, through an archway of roses, of the flower-garden.