Listening to her husband’s flattering acknowledgment of the fortuitousness—for him—of her brothers’ short tenancy of Copley Grange Farm, Agneta smiled sweetly back upon him. Mr. Amyott was somewhat worn and still more languid in his middle age; a man to whose over-cultivated nature much of the life around him, with which his wife’s fresh youth had some instinctive sympathy, was rough, rude, boisterous, and oppressive, even when it was not offensive, so that the abiding expression of his aristocratic features was wistful and pensive, rather than resolute and hopeful: still he was a fine patrician-looking man, only a little past the prime of life, and a trifle the worse for the wear. He was gentle and elegant—according to the old standard of elegance, in his whole tone; a shade plaintive and fretful occasionally, but never morose or violent. He was deferential, almost to a fault, to the wishes of his wife, which he was well able to gratify, since he happened to be in the possession of an ample, unencumbered rent-roll, a charming place, so well-ordered an establishment that her stepchildren never came in their young stepmother’s way, but fell at once into the pleasantest and most desirable relations with her, and a position second to few in the county. From Agneta’s point of view, she had good cause to be satisfied with the marriage which had fulfilled the expectations of her guardians. Her education—whatever else it had stifled in her, had served to develop largely a reasonable prudence. The Amyotts managed to make use of the fact of Oliver’s arrival that very afternoon, as an excuse for not waiting to receive the invitation to enter the Mill-house, which its master was in no haste to give, while both recognised that the omission on the first encounter served as an index of the extent of their future intercourse. Left alone, Oliver acknowledged the happy couple were free from ulterior designs in invading his privacy. Apart from these, what was Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? He had an idea that Harry and Horace Stanhope, with their baby, would settle down at a distance from Copley Grange, which would still farther simplify matters and smooth down awkwardnesses, so that in the future intercourse of the Manor-house and the Mill, Fan’s marriage, with its girlish aspirations, would soon be as though it had never been—and it was best so.