Fan had never smiled so sweetly on Harry in the whole course of his wooing, as she now smiled on the grudging, unjoyous groomsman, who, sure enough, was to be Harry’s servant, not hers. ‘Oh! I am glad and grateful that Harry’s oldest and best friend is to stand by him on his marriage day,’ she said audibly to the dull ears. ‘I know you are not thinking of me, and I do not wish you to think of me—I only say this to express, though you may not care to hear, what an obligation and honour you are conferring on me by acting as Harry’s brother still. But it is so, Mr. Horace’ (she had not begun to call him by his Christian name, just as he had never called her anything save ‘Miss Constable.’ She was in some apprehension that ‘Miss Constable’ would not even pass into ‘Mrs. Stanhope’ with Horace). ‘I will never forget your kindness to Harry,’ she finished. He looked at her for a moment with an impulse of furious displeasure added to his ordinary gruff, sardonic mood, as if he questioned her right to thank him for Harry, and bade her be wary of taking so much upon her. Then her tender tact penetrated the thick skin of his jaundiced, warped nature. ‘All right, Fan,’ he said, touching her hand and dropping it again, and giving what exacting, fastidious people might have classed as a ghastly grin. But from that date Fan was happily convinced that though she was a very small person compared to Harry in his brother’s eyes, Horace had forgiven her on the spot, and taken her, for all time to come, into a humble corner of the chamber of his affections, since she had shown herself capable of comprehending, in a degree, what the brothers were to each other, and would never seek to separate them. Thus Harry Stanhope’s lovers and slaves became sworn allies, and not vowed adversaries. The hard lines were for Oliver. It was all very well for Sally Pope to cackle that now Miss Fan had got her will, and she wished the young mistress well, neither was it any harm to speed her going, for marriage was the best lot that could befall most young women, and she would ‘fettle’ Master Oliver—see how comfortable she would make him, in all the old homely ways, like a king with his faithful housekeeper. Oliver had no doubt Sally would make his body comfortable, but what of the refreshment of his mind and heart now that his father was dead, when his only sister—the little Fan of other days—alienated from him already, should have left him in order to make a foolish _mésalliance_ of which no good could come? Friarton Mill in its sweet domestic beauty would be robbed of its chief attraction so soon as Fan was gone. CHAPTER XXV. ‘THE DEVIL SHALL NOT HAVE HARRY.’