Events had not so shaped themselves, while Peter Constable was modest, just, even generous. He would not set up his judgment against the combined opinions of those who ought to know better—the learned masters and parsons of Friarton Grammar School. Old Peter would not let his prepossessions and prejudices stand in the way of Oliver’s rise in life, if Oliver chose to rise; though to Peter’s mind such an ascent was very often neither a comfortable nor a creditable process. He would not constrain the lad to sacrifice an ambition which, with his gifts, might be natural and proper in him, in order to maintain old landmarks. As for Oliver, he responded plastically to the promptings of his early teachers. He was keen on colleges and college-learning with all the power and delight which those ideas then involved for him. And the child Fan was even more enthusiastic than her brother on the associations and attainments he was entering upon. She set herself with the pertinacity and absence of reasonable calculation of a woman, from the day Oliver left for college, to qualify herself for being, at no distant day, the worthy sister and fit companion of a great don—a dignitary high up in the Church, or an honoured judge. So Peter tried also to accommodate himself to the will of Providence and the force of circumstances. He was too old, indeed, to begin a course of training in order to figure suitably as the father of one of the magnates whose laurels were so quickly and easily won—in Fan’s imagination. He knew full well, that though his boy as yet was the same to him, and came home in the long vacation, rather to Fan’s disgust, unforgetful of and undisgusted with a single homely detail of the old life, though Oliver was, as he had ever been, perfectly natural and unaffected, and would lend a hand to make up accounts and to help his father with the management of the large business and many servants in every way in the young man’s power, still in the course of time Oliver’s widely different occupations must separate father and son.