A new idea was tickling Harry. ‘Look here, Horry; if we had stayed in the Farm we should have been Aggie’s tenants—bound to take off our hats to her. We might even have yoked ourselves into the carriage which brought her and her blooming bridegroom home from their marriage-tour. I wonder if she would have had an extra barrel of beer broached for my benefit? She has some small notion of the depth of my thirst. Wouldn’t it have been jolly? By Jove! we’ve spoilt an interesting episode for the county paper. “Charming tableau of attached relations forgetting the accidental diversities of rank and fortune and rushing into each other’s arms.” Don’t frown, Fan, my love; you would not have been called on to drag Aggie up the drive hooraying for our master and mistress. You would have sat at ease, over the way, and witnessed the gala from a respectful distance.’ ‘If it is any gratification to you to talk nonsense, Harry, why then, do it,’ said Fan, with a lingering reflection of her old girlish dignity, in the middle of her womanly pain at his want of comprehension and feeling, and yet with the pathetic indulgence to every defect in the man she loved, which far transcended both dignity and pain. Oliver knew he was still capable of quite another form of selfishness, when a letter from Mrs. Hilliard reached Fan. Mrs. Hilliard would not consent to lose sight of her kindred in exile, any more than when settled in a mill and bakehouse at her door. She had no further occasion, indeed, to acknowledge Fan’s triumph and pay it homage, but the eventual defeat of Mrs. Hilliard’s enemy was disarming in another way. Mrs. Hilliard was interested to learn what farther reversal of parts might occur among her cousins; and whether poor dear Harry Stanhope was to prove the reprobate out and out, as she rather feared would be the end. But nobody could help it save himself, he was the sole person to blame. It was Philistinish of the Constables to throw themselves into the breach, and make such a fuss about what was so likely to happen. It would have been far better for everybody to have hushed it up, to have put poor Harry and his drag of a brother quietly out of the way—not by murder, which might have had unpleasant consequences, but by banishment for life, while Fan came home to her brother. But these cousins of Mrs. Hilliard’s were not like anybody else, and would not behave like rational people in the common lot of having a prodigal among them.