Fan smothered the keen regret called forth by her brother’s unshaken, inveterate hostility to the marriage he could not hinder, and to the gulf deepening between them, as best she might. In every other light Fan’s lot was a triumph. For she had never been mercenary, any more than Harry had been. She had been aspiring in a sense, with a craving for superficial refinement, as somehow representing to Fan the far deeper refinement and nobility of nature, of which the surface polish—however becoming in itself and pleasant to encounter—is by no means the inseparable accompaniment; and for pure love of Harry Stanhope, Fan was prepared to crush her individual tastes. She was willing to be a poor man’s partner, to drudge as a practical housekeeper, to toil after another fashion as the notable wife of a lucky farmer, to forget her girlish dreams of bountiful ease, culture, and elegance. Fan had her bright, brief day both in a higher and a lower sense. She enjoyed that short interval in which a woman is beside herself and counts herself—not merely the happiest of women, but the only happy woman in the world deserving of the name, because she has not only won a heart in exchange for her own, but because this heart, subdued by her power, is the heart of hearts to her, compared to which all other hearts are little better than dross. Fan had also the lower, but what was to her the genuine and natural gratification of being conscious that those of her neighbours on whose opinions she had been wont to set store, having arrived at the unanimous conclusion that Fan Constable had done well for herself, became suddenly moved to change their chorus of condemnation to a chant of glorification. The Fremantles and Wrights proved themselves no more mercenary than Fan and Harry. The magnates of Friarton had not worshipped in fear and trembling a big burly image of mammon, but a shadowy fetish of gentility. Fan Constable, whom the ladies and the professional set now acknowledged to be the most charming ladylike girl in the neighbourhood, would not be a farmer’s wife to them. She would—since the inferior distinction merged and was lost in the superior—be the wife of Harry Stanhope, grandson of Lord St. Ives, nephew by marriage of Lord Mount Mallow. Accordingly these authorities renewed their withdrawn attentions with an eager lavishness, in striking contrast to the donors’ former cautious, stinted dole of recognition. They betrayed the knowledge, which Fan shared, that it would soon be her turn to pay them attention.