Truth to tell, Agneta Stanhope, who was assured of her position, while she did not approve from principle and instinct of debatable middle ground, still never so much as imagined that she could compromise herself by temporary association with people like the Wrights and Fremantles. It was as a pure matter of taste that she chose to disport herself among pronounced yeomen and tradespeople, whose habits and tastes, from an accident of education and a piquancy of flavour, were the opposite of oppressive to her. Fan Constable repaid Harry Stanhope’s confidence. She was very good to Agneta, devoting herself to the girl’s gratification with an abstract devotion—disinterested, guiltless of ulterior motives, peculiar to the young woman. It was no matter that Agneta’s pleasures, when they took the form of seeking for hens’ nests, and carrying the eggs home in the skirt of her gown, or wishing to milk cows, were not only startling but wholly antagonistic to Fan’s frame of mind and sense of fitness. It was rather the old story of the roc’s egg which Fan would have got at any price for her visitor. Fan in her solemn earnestness and absolute matter-of-factness, masqueraded too to please Agneta, played at the ideal miller’s daughter for whom the real miller’s daughter had been wont to entertain a great contempt, dawdling among the sedges by Buller’s Brook, sitting among the sacks in the mill gallery, munching groats with her white teeth, roasting them in the kiln, having herself weighed in the scales. And when Agneta requested, with fearless directness and insistance, to be taken to Friarton to see what she called ‘the ancestral shop,’ and be shown all over the premises in order to have the complicated processes of making bread rendered clear to her understanding, Fan went with the young lady without a demur. It was on this occasion that Fan heard Agneta beg for an unbaked cake, and pray that Oliver would carve her initials with his penknife on the soft crust, as if it were the bark of a tree, and he were another Orlando to her Rosalind, and then entreat that she might put it with her own hand into the oven, concluding by calling everybody to promise faithfully that when it came out, _her_ cake should be duly forwarded with the rest of the bread to Copley Grange Farm. Fan witnessed the ridiculous performance without more than a fleeting pang. And if Agneta Stanhope had further taken it into her head—full of fantastic whims—during the intoxication of these weeks which formed her first holidays, that she and Fan should fill baskets with floury loaves and carry them with their own hands to feed the poor, there would have been some danger of Fan’s complying with the absurd suggestion, in the height of her infatuation to please Harry Stanhope’s sister.