The tradespeople of Friarton could not be said to welcome with open arms Oliver Constable’s return to their shops and back parlours. His old acquaintances had liked him better than they had liked Fan, though he had been of Fan’s mind once on a day, and had looked down from the giddy heights of juvenile scholarship on the dull fat plains of trade, vowing superciliously that he should never rest in them. But, oddly enough, in proportion as Oliver became a man and changed his mind, his early friends learnt to distrust him more and more. True, Oliver’s recantation was received with shouts from young Dadd, chuckles from old Dadd, and giggles from the Polley girls, as at a conquest won by their class over that which pretended to be the superior rank. But Oliver’s outward adherence did not flatter his fellows out of their rooted conviction that he was not one of them, and might prove no better than a traitor in the camp. He was ‘a chield’ preparing to come among them, and take notes—not for the purpose of printing the notes, which would have been disloyal enough—but, what was far worse, with the intention of gauging the moral and intellectual condition of the shop people, and with the conceited aspiration of elevating it. And they had a strong objection to being thus elevated by a wolf in sheep’s clothing—old Peter Constable’s son spoilt by his own college education. He was giving himself out as intending to carry on his father’s trade, which he was safe to make a mess of, while he was nourishing deep designs under the cloak of the mill and the baker’s shop. He to be a miller and baker! Old Dadd had heard Oliver could read Greek like a parson, but he could no more throw off a covering of pie crust than he could fly. Why, it was only the other day he was walking up the High Street with his arm linked in Fremantle’s! Fremantle might be as poor as a church-mouse and only a better sort of school usher, but he could read the lessons in his white surplice on Sundays the same as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Dadd went in for chapel, not church, still even his minister owned that Fremantle was a cut above him in this world. And there was Mrs. Fremantle in her shabby gown—that woman only acknowledged the existence of such a female as Mrs. Dadd in the shop. No doubt Mrs. Fremantle was as gracious as could be over the counter, which was no less than her bounden duty, seeing the length of time her bills stood in his books, still, in the middle of her graciousness, she managed to convey the impression that his—Dadd’s—better half was of a different order of creation from that which had the honour of claiming Mrs. Fremantle as its product. Well, old Dadd, for his part, did not object. He was aware that the Fremantles, for all their poverty and shabbiness, dined at the squire’s table when he was at home, while Dadd and Mrs. Dadd got no farther than the housekeeper’s room; and neither did he wish to change places with the schoolmaster and his lady in this respect.