When Agneta Stanhope turned back her hair, or made it into a silken fringe for Oliver, as Alice Grey braided her hair for another; when Agneta set her gipsy hat in the most bewitching fashion at Oliver, and gathered blackberries in the company of the miller of Friarton Mill and his sister, the blackberries not being by any means Agneta’s chief object; when she turned a demure little dissenter, in the teeth of Fan Constable’s being a loyal churchwoman in right of the Constables’ mother, the curate’s daughter, and drew away the said churchwoman, to the great edification of Jack Dadd and ’Mily Polley, to evening attendance at the chapel favoured by the shopkeepers, where Oliver continued to worship as his fathers had worshipped before him; when Agneta sang her ballads, which, like homely Christian names, had begun to reappear in her set in proportion as they had died out in lower circles, her ‘Sweet Homes,’ and ‘Maids of Allanwater,’—the maid having been a miller’s daughter, let us observe in passing—her ‘Brooks’ and ‘Rosebuds,’ and told her naïve stories of the mild maidenly adventures she and Miss Dennison had met with in their quiet life, to Oliver, he showed no sign of perceiving her delicate manœuvres. He offered only a passive resistance. He stood like a rock assailed by summer waves rippling back from it with an incessant murmur, or like a giant Gulliver submitting with a patient, hardly perceptible shrug of his shoulders, awkward man as he was in his invulnerability, because he could not avoid the assault, to the airy overtures of a fair Lilliputian, who, reaching up on tiptoe, did not attain to the height of his knee. Harry Stanhope opened his eyes wide, and laughed aloud at the fine, and, of course, perfectly decorous little farce. ‘What a desperate flirt that monkey Aggie is going to prove, to be sure,’ he remarked to his gossip Horace; ‘barely out of the nursery, yet ready to fly at game like Constable! What would the child do with him if she did succeed in bringing him down? He would cumber her bag at starting, with a vengeance. Not Aunt Julia’s game, eh, Horry? But the old man can take care of himself, though he is as much in earnest in his way as his sister is in hers, and would be fit to do something outrageous if he were winged. The chit knows what she is about also, and, as no harm can come of it, she may be left to amuse herself, after the fashion of her kind.’ If Harry had not given _carte blanche_ Horry might have called it a positive disgrace for Aggie to attempt a flirtation with a man in Constable’s position, forgetting for the moment that he and Harry had elected to be yeomen, and that Agneta could therefore be viewed as the sister of two yeomen. But the oracle had spoken, and silenced any voice Horry might have exercised in the matter.