‘Aunt Julia found out that she could send old Jennings and meet Aggie in time for them to join her and the General at Crewe station and go on with them to Blackcombe, where the Herveys are to have some special affair for Dolph’s coming of age. They are old friends and connections of ours, you know, so it don’t matter that Aggie should be out at their ball before she has regularly come out of her shell. Ungrateful little wretch!—she professed to be bitten with our farm life, but wasn’t she quickly cured when she heard what was in store for her? All the same,’ Harry corrected himself, remembering to whom he was speaking, and prompted by his natural kindly feeling, ‘she was very sorry that she could not get over to see and thank you.’ Still in the face of this shock, which Oliver was too magnanimous to enlarge upon, Fan clung to her faith in Agneta’s eternal friendship—nay, sisterly affection. Fan was only confirmed in her tenacious belief by getting an inkling of the fact that not only Mrs. Hilliard, but all Friarton, not possessing a grain of Oliver’s tender consideration and unbounded generosity, were laughing at the end of the temporary alliance between the girls with more exuberant mirth than charitable sympathy. CHAPTER XX. OLIVER CAUSES A SPLIT IN THE CHAPEL CONNECTION BECAUSE OF HIS DOGGED OPPOSITION TO HARTLEY, NORRIS, AND CO. There was one man of Friarton descent whose distinguished fortunes occurred not once only to Fan Constable’s mind as presenting a marked contrast to her brother’s perverse crotchet of self-destruction, where his social position and even his material prosperity were concerned. For any tyro might crave leave to doubt whether Oliver Constable would increase or even retain the amount of fortune which his father had bequeathed to him by becoming a tradesman in his own person. As for Fan, she had been fully persuaded from the first that Oliver would ruin himself commercially—no less than socially. Oliver denied the necessity stoutly, and when it was thrust upon him, quoted, as Fan considered, irrelevantly, if not irreverently, the Divine assertion that a man’s life does not consist of the things which at the best he only seems to possess. Hartley, of the now renowned firm of Hartley, Norris, & Co., had stuck to trade down to the present generation. But then trade had made of the representative Hartley not simply a man, but a gentleman so far beyond challenge that he had not merely been spared from the counting-house and warehouses to Oxford, he had been permitted to become a sleeping partner, enjoying the funds without undergoing any of the toils of the huge, opulent concern which his immediate predecessors had founded, pushed, and fostered by unremitting exertions, giving themselves heart and soul to the business.