‘Oh! Oliver,’ protested Fan, hot and indignant as at an unfeeling slight to her idol, ‘I am sure her testimony to your merits would be very different, and—and much warmer. She thinks so much of your good opinion, too. Oh! Oliver, I am tempted to think you without eyes, or ears, or heart, and you a young man seeing nobody—here, at least—who is fit to be mentioned in the same breath with Agneta Stanhope, while it will be your own fault if——’ Fan stopped in time, she was the last woman to betray what looked to her upright, unsophisticated eyes, another woman’s weakness, however transparently that woman might herself reveal it. Fan had also become aware, in the case of the Polley girls, who, whatever their offences, had not lost their claim to modest womanhood, that she could not go nearer to mortally offending her brother than to hint at an unsolicited preference for him. Even at the mere implication he grew red again with a manly, modest man’s shame, mingled now with a strong dash of impatience and scorn. ‘You are grossly mistaken, Fan,’ he said, in the first impulse of anger; then he recovered himself and went on with a laugh not altogether forced, ‘Miss Stanhope (Oliver no more called her Agneta behind her back than to her face) is a little goose—save her young ladyship’s pretensions; but you are a greater fool than I took you for, Fannikin, if you imagine for a moment that she is sincere in more than in making the most of her holiday rustication—this is life in _villeggiatura_ to her—and in compelling us all to like her. She and Harry are extravagantly fond of being liked. I am afraid it don’t answer in his case, but in hers it will cause her to be a very popular great lady some day, I have no question. She has exceedingly pretty, gracious, high-bred ways—you hear I grant they are pretty, the prettier that they are second nature rather than affectation. But she is also as thorough a woman of the world as if she were ten—twenty years older, ready to counsel her daughter as Tennyson’s aristocratic matron instructed her child.’ Fan was utterly incredulous and gravely offended. She would not give up Agneta Stanhope’s looking upon Fan and her brother as perfect equals, even if she were not suffered to add that, so far as Agneta’s personal choice went, she would not have objected to casting in her lot with them. Fan was only a little staggered by some words which Harry let fall when he came over unexpectedly one morning to offer his sister’s excuses for having been hurried away sooner than she had counted on from the Farm, without being able to bid good-bye to Miss Constable. For, in truth, like the sweet, graceful vision that she had flashed upon them, Agneta Stanhope vanished in a moment, vision-like, out of the Constables’ sphere.