‘Them as told me,’ said Sally, after a pause to recover her breath in her unconscious dramatising of the miserable details, ‘maintained that Polley did interfere, and try to put in a word for his daughter; but, in course, his wife would not hear him, and it do stand to reason that he has been so poor a critter, he has lost all title to be listened to. The long and the short of it is, the talk was over the whole town the next morning. The Cobbes took ’Mily in—they could not do less—with Birt, who had got the gal into trouble, their brother; and ’Mily Polley is to be married, and go straight off to Lon’on, or Manchester, or Glasgow—one of them big towns—with her bargain next week. Folk think Sam Cobbe’s that ashamed, he has forked out the money—though he’s none so rich, and the coal and potato trade ain’t so flourishing—and has used all his influence to over-persuade Birt, by threatening to expose him to his uncle in the Customs, to make the gal the amends of marrying her against his will—the mean scuff.’ ‘I am afraid it is a bad business,’ admitted Oliver sadly, compelled as he was to regard this lingering version, in a lower walk of life, of the wild, youthful escapades, and the half-brutal parental tyranny and violence which met the rebellion half way, that were to be found in every rank, before Christian civilisation did its work, a century and more ago. Now such evil tales were only possible among the desperately vicious of the highest, and the desperately ignorant of the lowest, ranks, or in the gross materialism and incapability of self-restraint which form the standing reproach and grievous disfigurement, to set against the many virtues of that large class of smaller shopkeepers—to raise whom in the scale of humanity Oliver Constable had been willing to devote his life. Oliver went immediately to Friarton to look after his own business. It did not take him long to despatch what he had to do. He had only to receive the last report from the not greatly interested foreman. It was quite what Oliver had expected. He went through it in less than an hour. It took him no more than ten minutes afterwards to write out, in the back shop, his announcement of giving up his father’s and his own baking business—he could not pretend to sell the goodwill of what had ceased to pay its cost—to be inserted in the next week’s Friarton’s newspapers.