The three years allotted by his brother-farmers for Harry Stanhope to run through what small patrimony he had invested in Copley Grange Farm, and what credit he had begun upon, did their work more effectually than the months given by Oliver Constable for Harry to tire of his part as a yeoman. Fan had held her husband back with a little hand which was like a vice for staunchness, but which had, at last, loosened its grip under overwhelming pressure. Horace had thrown his passive dead weight in the way, to impede Harry’s swift progress to ruin. Oliver Constable had not stood aside in sulky neutrality, or hard inflexibility flavoured with vindictiveness, to witness the fulfilment of his predictions. He would have given much for them to prove false. He did all he could to prevent their realisation. He had little in common with his brother-in-law, and it was in the characters of the two men to grow always more apart instead of nearer to each other. Still Oliver, though he was not much in Harry Stanhope’s company, and though Harry showed himself constantly more restive, under any influence which Oliver had ever possessed over him, tried his best in the thankless office of looking after Harry, when he was beyond his wife’s scope, and of interposing to save him—not merely from the consequences of his own folly, but from falling a victim to his neighbours’ weaknesses. As a result of this knight-errantry on Oliver’s part, there was an entire rupture between him and Jack Dadd on Harry’s account. Harry Stanhope’s incapacity for drawing distinctions—moral as well as social—his vanity and passion for popularity, had all pointed with tolerable clearness to one conclusion from the first. He had no notion of what was expedient. He was not particular in his easygoing fashion. He was bound to turn soon from his self-imposed obligations, selected very much at haphazard, and sitting with the greatest lightness upon him. He must have excitement of some kind, at any cost. The upper, and, to be fair, the more decorous, set in Friarton, which had commenced by being delighted with their opposite in Harry Stanhope’s _abandon_, matched as it was with his gentle birth and breeding, ceased to prize his company when they found it was bestowed on their social inferiors with a thousand times the lavishness and indiscriminateness which they had severely censured in Oliver Constable. And all the time Oliver had claimed a right to act as he did, and asserted a principle in it, while he had shown a method in his madness. In the course of the last three years, he had brought his accusers to acknowledge that, though he had lost himself in the matter of his money, talents, and education, with the desirable position which they might have commanded, he was not a reprobate, and he had known when to stop long before the climax of individual degradation.