‘His good angel will interfere. How dare you accuse and prophecy evil of a better man than yourself—if humility and kindliness are better than arrogance and harshness, as the Bible teaches?’ Fan stood at bay for her lover. ‘Harry is not a student or a scholar, any more than I am by nature,’ she said more quietly; ‘but that does not make him and me less of a man and a woman than if we were a fantastic theorist and an abstracted visionary. If he thinks of his pleasure, why not? when his pleasure has always been manly and honest—and is not that to his credit, left to himself, to all intents and purposes, as he has been? And it is not true that he cares only for himself; he has been a good and true brother, as he will be good and true in all the relations of life.’ Oliver groaned. ‘Do you know what the farmers, with whom he classes himself, say of his conceited, childish enterprise? They lighten their own troubles by guffawing over his muddles and messes. They say, “The plough would need to turn up gold for Mr. Stanhope to reap a harvest, even if times were as good as they are bad for agriculture.” They calculate confidently he will have succeeded in making such a mull of the business into which he has rushed, without a particle of knowledge or experience, that he will be sold out and polished off in three or four years at the farthest.’ ‘The more need of the nearest and dearest of his friends to stand by him,’ said Fan, with steadfast eyes. ‘His best friend will not be able to stand by him and defend him from the ruinous consequences of the new habits he is grafting on the old,’ maintained Oliver doggedly. ‘Harry Stanhope was known at Oxford as one of the most careless and reckless of the undergraduates who were his contemporaries. He was so unboundedly social that he was never missing where company of any kind congregated. If he could not get good, he could put up with bad. He was a regular frequenter of village alehouses, as well as a conspicuous figure at every “wine” within his reach. Now—country-town markets and the farmers’ circles in commercial inns are his great resorts. To a man of Harry Stanhope’s accommodating temperament, every company in which swallowing strong drink is inseparably associated with friendly intercourse, must prove playing with fire. God forbid that I should say the lad is cursed by a fatal taint, but it will be next to a miracle in his case if the demon is disappointed in getting possession of his victim.’ ‘Oliver,’ said Fan, with bated breath in her anger, as she stood on the hearthrug, confronting him, ‘who is it that did not care though he were mixed up with the low larks of the shop lads of Friarton, so that even respectable people could grow common liars and slanderers, taking it upon them to say that he was sentenced to carry about in his person, to his dying day, the mark of his degrading excesses?’