‘I wouldn’t wish to do that,’ said Jim, more formally than heartily or cheerfully. ‘That don’t belong to my place. But I’m nigh an old man, about as old as your father, and grown grey with the Constables: if putting my experience at your service could have been of any use, it belonged to my dooty.’ ‘Thanks,’ said Oliver, quickly. ‘You are quite right to ease your conscience. But I am afraid I must earn my experience like the rest of the world—I must have my fling—try to work out my theories, and when they break down, then begin to mend them—do you take me, Jim?’ ‘Oh, ay, sir,’ said Jim with polite dryness, ‘and I had as well say good morning to you, and go about my own business in the bake-shop.’ Oliver let him go, and sat alone twisting his stalwart body in his armchair. ‘The game would not be worth the candle,’ he reflected, ‘if one paid heed only to these clods in the mill and cheeky swaggerers in the bakehouse; and there is old Jim, conservative to the backbone, even while he is full to the tongue of class prejudice and jealousy. He feels the world turning upside down with him; yet he sets his face against the only hope of control for the new spirit. But the principles of right and wrong are eternal and as capable of being fought out in a mill and a bakehouse as on any other battle-field.’ CHAPTER IX. THE NEW TENANTS OF COPLEY FARM. OLIVER was standing before the mulberry-bush in the mill-house court watching the colony of white ducks which waddled up from the water and claimed their right in the dropping mulberries. He had stepped out of one of the windows of the parlour, which Fan, with tacit reproach and soreness of spirit, had re-constituted the family sitting-room. Since Oliver chose to be a miller and baker, the old mill-house parlour was in keeping with his calling and good enough for him. Oliver welcomed the change with much satisfaction which escaped being damped from his want of full knowledge of what was passing in his sister’s mind, and his absolute incapacity of sympathising with it. He stood hunching up his shoulders, his hands in his pockets. He was bareheaded, so that the light summer wind lifted his hair, blowing it across his forehead as near his eyes as the shortness of the locks would allow, without discomposing him. The same wind every moment plucked off and strewed about the last full-blown red and white rose petals and reversed the leaves of the mulberry and the willow round the corner, turning their white sides uppermost and silvering whole branches at once.