Fan was perfectly conscious of a deficiency, while she would rather lay herself open to a charge of something lacking in her room, than to the countercharge of false adornment. But she was not sensible that the chief and unpardonable defect was the absence of all trace of human joy or sorrow, all touch of human character and token of individual bent, which might have redeemed the barest room; and that it was the sense of uneasiness and uncertainty, of doubting and halting on the threshold of a new order of existence which rendered the atmosphere of this room repellant as well as cold. Mrs. Hilliard was speaking a certain amount of nonsense when she added that Fan’s room contained the last drawing-room suite advertised by Maple or Shoolbred, weeded to death, since neither Maple—nor Morris himself—could have adequately supplied the fatal weakness of that room. But Fan’s own presence did something to enrich it. Fan in her sweeping mourning was a small, fine-featured, keen-eyed, dark-haired, restless little woman, whose temperament was the reverse of lymphatic, who had none of the facile, mindless, heartless sweetness that would have added the last mawkish offence to the other offences. How a creature like Fan could exist even for an hour at a time in such a domestic desert, how she could fail to impress on it some token of her ardent identity, only proved the strong self-restraint, the determination of purpose of which the girl was capable. Fan was idle this afternoon as she was rarely idle, since her energy, like that of Michael the Wizard’s little fiends, demanded a constant field for its operation; and as she was inclined to treat with withering contempt all the poor little girlish fancy-work which had ever come under her notice, she was notable, for her years, in household management, and practical in feminine wisdom. Fan could have kept the house, and regulated and overlooked the _ménage_ very nearly as well as Sally Pope—in fact she did so when Sally would let her—and this is no small testimony to Fan’s talents, for old Sally Pope was an experienced and efficient, if conceited, housekeeper and cook. Not a girl in Friarton, not one of the well-born vicar’s daughters, who had each received an excellent education, seen something of the great world, was clever in her own way, and knew herself compelled to make the most of her allowance for dress and minor expenses, could spend that allowance more judiciously in every respect than Fan Constable—who might have been supposed to revel in rude abundance—could dispose of her private income. Not a girl, hardly a matron in the parish, was so available for choir-practising, school teaching, managing the details of charitable clubs as Fan Constable had already proved herself,—facts which the vicar’s wife, and the mistress of Copley Grange, when she was alive, knew right well.