but she lacked full humanity, and could not follow him in his fellow-feeling with Betty Foy and Peter Bell. She still thought Wordsworth had made a huge mistake in his vocation, and that Oliver Constable had capped him with a blunder as gross. Even if he would choose Wordsworth, why did he not read from ‘The Horn of Egremont Castle,’ or ‘The White Doe of Rylstone,’ as more fit for a popular assembly than the ‘Ode to Immortality’ could be? No; Macaulay might be deplorably intolerant in recording—were it for his private satisfaction—the judgment he had formed, and Madame Bunsen might be singularly inappreciative where such a woman was concerned, but there was ground for their censure though none for their contempt. And Oliver Constable would have done far better to have selected one of the ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’—even with its classic story and unfamiliar names—for Friarton ears. CHAPTER XIX. AN ILLUSION. Oliver Constable, watching the young aristocratic beauty Agneta Stanhope masquerading with her brothers, thought of Marie Antoinette essaying a Dresden china shepherdess’s life at Little Trianon. He judged that Marie Thérèse’s high-spirited, frolicsome daughter, whose fair-haired beauty, in its flower, was not without its buxomness, princess and queen though she was, had less refined traits, so far as he could make out from her early pictures, till terrible misfortune lent the face tragic majesty, than were to be found in the pale, delicately cut little features of this simply well-born English girl who had been brought up in the calculated shade, seclusion, and exclusivism, of an aristocratic schoolroom, with only a formal walk, or ride or drive for exercise, while she had remained totally uninitiated in the swimming, rowing, and skating exercises which are beginning at last to be allowed to diversify more elderly forms of ‘constitutionals’ for the girls of the upper ten thousand. Agneta’s lawn games even had been generally affairs of two, with one of the two what Harry would have called ‘a confirmed duffer and fogy,’ while the girl’s early romps with her schoolboy brothers had been few and far between.