But after Jack had gloated a little longer on the edifying spectacle of ’Liza’s discomfiture in being reduced to the company of one of her own sex, while she underwent the double humiliation of seeing ‘Turnips’ preferred to her, his good-nature led him to quit ’Mily, who was at no loss to find a substitute for her attendant, and go to ’Liza, though his sympathy took the doubtful form of teasing her with chaff about her rival. Still, ’Liza had the comfort of being quits in the end with Oliver, who remained profoundly ignorant of the whole by-play. It was one of the established customs of the day at Finchhanger that those girls—not tom-boys and pickles, or humbler cynics like ’Mily Polley, who held the practice in strong contempt as strictly belonging to idiots of shop girls and low lads of Sunday-school teachers—should bring back rural trophies from the picnic, in fast-withering, limply-dangling wreaths of oak leaves and ferns, obscuring and imperilling the real gum flowers in the girls’ hats. Sometimes an obliging young man consented to have his hat or cap—in the band of which he would on other occasions rollickingly stick his pipe or railway ticket—similarly decorated by willing if bungling fingers, with such spoils as Ophelia gave her life for. And it was Oliver who, at this picnic, under the severe eyes of Fan—supporting Celia Reid’s head on her shoulder to prevent her patient from fainting away—weakly submitted to ’Liza Polley, with recovered spirits, decking his miller’s hat with briony. He was thinking of the summer roses round his mill-house window, and of what he had counted his only opportunity of being crowned like an ancient Greek. But Mrs. Polley began pursing up her mouth, and even Polley looked knowing and important. As for ’Mily, she asked Jack Dadd if it was to be his turn next, and Jack answered with more plainness than politeness that he would not make such an ass of himself. ‘Like Bottom the weaver,’ said Oliver, with reckless waste of simile. ‘Well, it is more in the way of rubbish of weavers than of any fellers that I have been accustomed to keep company with,’ said Jack loftily, giving Oliver a lesson in good manners. In spite of it, and of his self-consciousness, Oliver wore the hat and its ill-arranged garniture with an excellent assumption of composure on the return to Friarton. CHAPTER XVII. AGNETA STANHOPE. Before the autumn had well begun, while the Stanhopes flattered themselves they were like the other farmers in the heat of harvest work, their only sister was permitted to come on a visit to them at Copley Grange Farm, and she entered into the situation with girlish relish equal to, though different from, Harry’s.