In fact, Mrs. Hilliard’s house was what the vicarage often is in country society, a sort of neutral ground and meeting place for different classes—or degrees of classes, in the community—not that its mistress would descend so far as to receive ordinary tradespeople and fraternise with them, Fan now reflected, gloomily. Yet Mrs. Hilliard had opened her doors to the brother and sister since they were a mere boy and girl, and had in her turn visited at Friarton Mill. And she had not come exactly as the Fremantles and Wrights, the dignitaries of the Grammar School, had come, because the mill family, so far as it had to do with Oliver, might be regarded as in a transition state, and on the point of taking flight into higher regions; but because Mrs. Hilliard, though a well-born, well-married woman, the daughter of a rural dean and the widow of a commodore, was really distantly related to the Constables through their mother. Mrs. Constable, as Fan never forgot, had been the daughter of a clergyman, not a dissenting minister but a regular parson of the Church of England. But, after all, there are clergymen and clergymen even of the Church of England. The poor curate who had been Mrs. Constable’s father had lived and died in very different circumstances from those of the comfortably situated rural dean to whom Mrs. Hilliard had owed allegiance. The curate, to begin with, had stooped and married the daughter of a yeoman, who on his part had not enjoyed any of the plain plenty apt to be associated with a great farmhouse. Accordingly, the curate’s brood of children had been brought up in a spare as well as homely fashion, until they had been sent out into the world to earn their living, and make their own way, as clerks and nursery governesses; one of those governesses, with her limited education and still more limited earnings—not to be compared to a good cook’s wages—was found not unwilling to exchange her anxious dependence and drudgery for the serene independence and importance, in her own sphere, of the mistress of Friarton Mill. Strange to say, the fact of the slight tie of blood between the two women failed to prevent Mrs. Hilliard from settling at Friarton when the Meadows offered itself to her and her man of business—at once as a good investment for her spare money and a suitable house which she could make a home.