This was the pair whom Oliver Constable brought to Fan’s tea-table that summer afternoon. Fan received the strangers with very formal courtesy, until Oliver mentioned them more particularly as fellow-Oxonians, when she suddenly brightened all over and became gracious to the tips of her fingers, and there was something specially flattering in Fan Constable’s earnest abandonment of graciousness. Oliver groaned a little privately—going off as he did on a wrong cue. All women were led captive by good looks and winning tongues, and Harry Stanhope was a bonnie, pleasant boy enough to serve for the pair, to extend his passport to yellow-skinned, turned-tempered Horace. But Oliver would have thought that Fan had more sense than to be carried away by the eyes—granted that in measuring Harry from head to foot, they found a sop for their individual weakness in the fact that his whole air and every movement, no less than his clothes—rough and ill-used, from his battered wide-awake to his muddy boots—belonged originally to no farmer’s ‘cut,’ but were the bearing and dress of a better-born, better-bred man. But all the same, Oliver comforted himself with reckoning Fan would be thoroughly disgusted when she learnt the young man’s precious scheme. For if Oliver had wounded her sense of propriety by sticking to their father’s trade from worthy motives, must she not be scandalised outright by the Stanhopes’ mean-spirited desertion of their post and voluntary abasement simply to save themselves from the trouble of shaping a career and securing a provision for their wants in any other fashion? Oliver had not yet gauged the depths of a woman’s inconsistency. He found himself twice deceived in his clever man’s egregious simplicity. When Fan was told the news that the Stanhopes had become the tenants of Copley Grange Farm, she grew radiant, and threw herself into Harry’s mad project with positive enthusiasm.