Fan, in her chrysalis state, had often looked from the mill side of the Brook across to the park and great house, with its dignified blot of an Italian façade. She had fancied how bountiful and gracious life must be there, contrasted with life in the back shops and parlours of the Polleys and Dadds. But she had felt then that if by virtue of Oliver’s genius and scholarship she ever rose to cross the threshold of such an Eden of refinement and culture, its roses would be full of thorns for her, simply because she would not be, like the daughters of that privileged region, to the manner born. Innately she was a lady, but outwardly she would blunder and flounder in the labyrinths of precedence and etiquette, or amidst the appalling topics of sport, horses and wines, from all acquaintance with which her sex, alas! did not exempt a woman of the higher orders. Fan would cause flippant waiting-maids to titter, and staid butlers to frown, at her mistakes. Now all this was changed. When Fan should procure the ‘Open, Sesame!’ to the charmed houses by so strange a process as that of becoming a yeoman’s wife and doing a yeoman’s wife’s work, all her troubles would be at an end. Harry had been born to the purple, and he would always be at hand to give involuntarily the cue which she would take as quickly as ever King Cophetua’s beggar-maid borrowed lustre from her royal husband, and developed without loss of time into a right queenly lady. Fan would not wear sparkling diamonds or sumptuous velvet, indeed, but she had never cared for jewels or fine clothes or luxury. What she had cared for she would attain, the simple elegance of bearing and behaviour of a gentlewoman, by art as well as by nature. In the meantime, while these chickens were unhatched, Friarton took it as a matter of course that Harry Stanhope’s kindred should begin by looking coldly on the projected alliance between Copley Grange Farm and Friarton Mill, and did not think of deposing Fan from her pedestal as a bride because she was subjected to this ordeal. One relative came forward before the knot was tied, and accepted Fan—not simply as an inevitable misfortune, but as a member of the illustrious family of Stanhope. The next time Harry came to the Mill, after Agneta’s note had been received there, he was not only attended by his second shadow; a voice, which had been hitherto dumb, spoke. Horace managed, with his surly awkwardness—which was something quite different from Oliver Constable’s awkwardness—and his bilious ungraciousness, even in conferring a compliment, which made it seem as if a good-natured impulse went entirely against the grain with him, to propose himself as Harry’s groomsman. ‘If you don’t mind, if no other body will serve Harry’s purpose, and help to turn him off,’ he said to Fan in the voice, the tone of which was out of tune and grating, unless sometimes when he addressed his brother.