At last Oliver turned into the court, walking and carrying his bag from the station as usual—‘as if nothing had happened,’ Fan exclaimed to herself, with a quick shade of vexation, while she ran downstairs to welcome him on the threshold. There was little family likeness between the brother and sister, as there were few points in unison in their characters, beyond what existed in their uprightness and the depth of regard between the two—who, so far as near kindred was concerned, stood alone in the world and were all in all to each other. Certainly Oliver was spare as Fan was slight, and there was a little of a worn look about the young man’s thin face, which testified to the work of nervous energy there also. But he was big and Fan was little. His hair was brown, straight, and already thin. Hers was black, wavy and luxuriant. He had a ruddy tinge in the brown of his complexion which no burning of the midnight oil—and he had burned it in his time with a young man’s superb recklessness—had served to rout. Fan’s complexion was the clear paleness often found in a brunette. But the greatest contrast in Oliver and Fan Constable’s features was found in the eyes, though in both brother and sister these were brown. Fan’s had the hazel tint and the keen observation combined with the shyness of a pheasant or a partridge’s eye. Oliver’s eyes were darker in hue, and though they were not without repressed fire, had much of the brooding reflectiveness—verging on doggedness—of the ox’s eye. Oliver Constable was firmly knit, and ought to have carried himself as easily, and with as natural a grace, in his broad-shouldered height, as Fan did in her low stature. But the peculiar neatness and daintiness of personal belongings which constituted not only a crowning distinction but a ruling passion in Fan, so that slovenliness and disorder caused her absolute pain, were wholly absent in her brother’s case. There could not have been the remotest chance, even supposing he had been a short instead of a tall man, of his worst enemies calling Oliver ‘dapper’ or ‘smug,’ as some of Fan’s ‘dear friends’ chose to term her ‘natty’ or ‘trim.’ But although Oliver wore the grey morning suit which has replaced the ‘purple’ in connection with the ‘fine linen’ in the dress of a Dives or a duke, which is at once perfectly unassuming and perfectly good of its kind, the miller’s son and heir suffered from an innate, incurable personal negligence, such as besets some men in all ranks and in all nations—only the defect in an Englishman belonging to one of the upper classes is free from the repulsive element of uncleanliness which is apt to attend on the Bohemian negligence of a foreigner.