Then Oliver had been of a mind to show that he would not neglect any lawful means of improving his flour and bread, so he had set about introducing expensive new machinery into the mill and bakehouse. But being, after all, a green hand, without his father’s practical experience in his double trade, the young man committed several astounding blunders in the adoption of the machinery, and was much out of pocket as a punishment for the errors of his ignorance. The result awoke no small amount of jeering, crowing, and laughter at the leading tea and supper tables of Friarton. Oliver’s inner man had not fared better during these three harassing years. Fan’s house was not a second home to him. The sole effect, so far as he could see, of his striving to fraternise in the true sense with the Dadds and the Polleys was that he had succeeded in arousing in his father’s old allies a hostile and mocking temper, not pleasant to encounter. Since his quarrel with Jack Dadd, the old Dadds, who naturally took their son’s part, had fought shy of Oliver Constable; and he had also, in some manner, he could not for the life of him tell how, given serious offence to the whole Polley family. He supposed they were enlisted, with hot, resentful party spirit, or what they mistook for party spirit, on Jack Dadd’s side. Oliver was half right, half wrong. For he was incapable of perceiving the other and major ground of complaint which the Polleys had against him—because, after raising false expectations, he had stopped short of seeking to keep company either with ’Liza or one of her sisters, in the prospect of matrimony. Mrs. Hilliard had never gone so far as to shut her door against Oliver Constable. Nay, she had been so candid as to admit with pleasure that her later prognostications with regard to him had been premature, and in the main erroneous. But Oliver’s chief inducement—as he had come to acknowledge to himself after there was no further need of crushing it down—for availing himself of the privilege of visiting at the Meadows, had vanished from the date of the terrible illness which had seized on Catherine Hilliard. It was one of the worst of those indefinite, incalculable, nervous illnesses, bred of the conditions of modern life, which have no beginning and no end, which baffle by their very intangibility and paralyse by their unrelaxing clutch, and one of whose horrors is that in their abnormal character they may develop symptoms piteously fantastic and grotesque, like the antics of madness. Such illnesses, dreaded not without cause, are apt, when they spare the wasted life, to reduce the patient to a state of unrelieved, permanent prostration and chronic invalidism, which is death in life.