Not only did Fan’s love cling to Harry in his social and moral decline still more closely than when she had learned to love him in the heyday of his natural gifts; even Oliver—who had early taken Harry for what he was worth, and condemned him to his destiny, now in the teeth of what he had done to Fan, felt the man’s heart within him turn and soften with yearning and commiseration for the stripling who was so unequally matched, and was standing foot to foot, reeling under the shocks inflicted by a giant adversary and ghastly foe. Oliver needed this compensation of human tenderness revived and called forth in the heart of a benevolent man, by human weakness and peril in its sorriest guise and direst strait, to help to make up to him for the sacrifice he was called on to offer; since the world had not gone well with Oliver Constable during these last years, and his own affairs required the unremitting attention which he saw himself compelled, and had pledged himself to Fan, to give to those of another. Oliver had started on his mission impressed with the conviction that it behoved him especially to make his business prosper, or, if he could not do that, to prevent its becoming disastrous, in order to remove the slur thrown liberally on Jacks-of-all-trades, geniuses, and enthusiasts. He had not the slightest inclination to the modified martyrdom of commercial losses for their own sake. He decidedly objected to wasting the money which his father had carefully gathered that Oliver’s career as a gentleman and scholar might be untrammelled, even for a good object, if he could prevent it. On the contrary, it was part of Oliver Constable’s duty, as he conceived it, to vindicate the truth that the best citizenship and the best Christianity did not, as a matter of course, conduct a diligent, prudent, and self-denying tradesman straight into the Bankruptcy Court. But Oliver was fated to share the lot of most real reformers and pioneers of the highest civilisation—the only civilisation which is not merely skin-deep, but which, penetrating to the core, pervades the whole man, and by the grace of God never leaves him, only departing when he himself departs, to dwell with him in heavenly habitations—and of the righteous Gospel which the Lord of Righteousness delivered to be worked out—not in church or chapel wholly or even principally, but on such fields as the Rialto of Venice or the London Exchange, the shops of common tradesmen, the tables where feasts, great and small, are held, the hearths round which men and women meet to rest from the work of the day, and cheer their souls. But Oliver had to discover for himself, in more ways than one, the pithiness of the proverb that to give a dog an ‘ill name’ is to hang him, that to run a-muck against popular prejudices is to suffer injury more or less severe, and wait long for any shadow of a reward.