‘Who shall prevent us?’ cried Mrs. Hilliard. ‘If the town take it into its thick head to give you its freedom on an exquisitely illuminated card—the illumination done by the most accomplished young lady in the place—or if it think fit to crown you with an olive-wreath covered with goldbeater’s leaf, you will have to submit. It would never do for you to be ungracious, that would spoil everything.’ ‘Then don’t let the town take it into its head. Upon the whole, you had better all suffer me to go away in peace, before you recover from your delusion.’ ‘It is not now we are deluded,’ said Catherine. ‘Our eyes have been opened, so that we—some of us, no longer see men and women—not so much like trees walking, but as hideous caricatures. We see plain at last, and recognise our kind—our kin, God-sib—our gossips, if you will, as God made them, through what they have made themselves, or what their neighbours have consented to make them. Do you think so lightly of us as to imagine we shall ever forget the sight? Do you not know it is like life from the dead to recognise brothers and sisters—a great multitude which no man could number, wherever we turn? No, you will not have the heart to go away from Friarton,’ she finished, in a lower tone which was still audible to him, as she played with her spoon, ‘just when we are beginning to understand, and when God is going to show you the work of your hands, and to establish it.’ Oliver made an excuse to cross the room with his cup. On his return to his seat, he paused behind Catherine Hilliard’s chair, and said for her ear alone, ‘Take care, Catherine, or else you will be more cruel in the end than in the beginning.’ ‘Have I been cruel?’ she asked, drawing back shyly. But this was the season of settling accounts, and he deserved full payment. ‘No, not to you,’ she whispered tremulously, with a soft smile. ‘If I was cruel, it was to myself—never to you.’ Mrs. Hilliard entered her protest, later in the evening; for Oliver stayed to dinner without troubling to go home to dress, and he was still lingering, talking, as he had never talked in his life before, after Mrs. Hilliard had reminded him there was such a ceremony as locking the doors in most households. Then she suggested, ‘If there are to be two enthusiasts, social reformers, muscular Christians—whatever you like to call yourselves—instead of one, and I’m sure one was quite enough to come to grief, what is to become of me, I should like to know? I shall have a bad time of it, for though Catherine is her own mistress, there is such a being as an indignant ex-guardian, and I’m not her sole cousin. When all trades are held alike, and everybody is respected, half of my occupation will be gone, while my ungrateful kindred, whom I have suffered to set good, sound long-established social distinctions at defiance, will never admit a laughing hyena into their menagerie.’