He had no manner of doubt that the reward of disarming distrust and establishing a right to success would come in time, if the worker could but possess his soul in patience, and exercise sufficient faith, endurance, and bountiful liberality, if he could tarry and lay out, nothing doubting, fresh materials and pains. Oliver’s fortitude was not exhausted, but he was sensible he had spent some of his funds freely, and would soon be living on the verge of his income, if he did not economise every fraction and dedicate it to its proper use. The secession of Jim Hull, with the establishment of his nephew in fine new baking premises and a fine new business in the town, had diverted a large slice of the public confidence and custom from what were now held the _old_ Constable premises and business. The slice was always increasing in size, and diminishing the original _pièce de résistance_, from which it had been taken by the shrewdness which proved quite justified in the anticipation that the public would prefer apparent purity and actual adulteration, both in the produce of the mill and the bakehouse, to the uncorrupted but unbleached article. There was the additional stimulus to the withdrawal of patronage of a strong spice of malicious satisfaction, not enough to form a conspiracy, but existing in sufficient abundance for lending countenance and support, whether sly or bold, to a rival business conducted on good old-fashioned, rational, give-and-take principles. Oliver Constable had come among the Friarton shopkeepers uttering high-flown heresy, witnessing in his conduct against time-honoured liberties of trade, and stirring up doubts in the bosoms of the very tradesmen—not to say of their customers. So the Dadd and Polley part of the community had no objection that Oliver should bear in his own person the brunt of his Quixotic ideas. Perhaps that would teach him to pay greater respect to their superior age and experience. In short, Oliver’s business profits were diminishing so steadily as to threaten to make his mill and bakehouse eat their own heads, if he did not diminish in proportion the staffs of millers and bakers—a step which he objected to take so long as he could afford to hold out, since it would not only be tantamount to an admission that he was outmatched, he argued with himself, it would be hard upon the men who had submitted to his rules and consented to work on his terms—not that he had altogether overcome the workmen’s opposition. His reputation had gone abroad as a master full of new-fangled fancies and hobbies, therefore he had been exposed to the further disadvantage of possessing a succession of restless, suspicious servants, flighty on their own account, and inclined to perpetual experiments on, and changes of, employers.