But Oliver was roused from his equanimity when he shared the sensation felt by all Friarton at the news that John Hartley had come down with Lady Cicely and their household to be even nearer neighbours to the Constables than the Stanhopes were, by occupying Copley Grange, lent to them by the squire, while the sleeping partner showed himself wide awake in contesting the representation of the county, just left vacant by the death of the late member. Hartleys to right of him, Stanhopes to left of him, how could Oliver resist the admission, for the moment at least, that he was with them and not with the Dadd and Polley set, to which he had sent in his adherence? For John Hartley made his first canvassing call on his next neighbour the miller and baker, and though he did not conceal that he was at Friarton Mill to solicit political support, he acknowledged there, as he was prepared to announce on the hustings, that he was a tradesman, and frankly claimed the vote of a brother-tradesman, who understood John Hartley’s circumstances and the advantage of returning him to Parliament. John Hartley was a quiet agreeable man, handsome, with a slightly affected assumption of Bohemian fashions in his ferocious beard, semi-artistic slouched sombrero, and colossal meerschaum. In reality he had not the slightest taint of the Bohemian about him, being pacific, prudent, and somewhat obstinate. He had only adopted the gentlemanlike Bohemian as being the reverse of the gentlemanlike tradesman. Lady Cicely called on Miss Constable. Lady Cicely was not childish or girlish, like Agneta Stanhope. The sleeping partner’s partner admired Friarton Mill in a well-bred way, but she never made the smallest pretence of going mad for rusticity or of playing at being a rustic. Neither did she mistake Fan for the typical Miller’s daughter. The visitor took care, notwithstanding, to infer with perfect tact, all the while, that she was a little struck by finding Miss Constable a different person from what might have been expected. Not that Lady Cicely implied Fan was her equal. Lady Cicely was a stout, commonplace, slightly stolid young woman—the least gratifying, to a highly-trained eye, of all John Hartley’s surroundings, so that one had to consider there was that in her origin which indemnified the mind for the loss—bordering on an offence—to the eye. Still she was not without dignity in her double chin, and certainly not without mind; she never lost sight of the fact, or suffered Fan to lose sight of it for a moment, though it was by no means insisted on with unladylike self-assertion, it was quietly taken for granted, that an earl’s daughter and a tradesman’s daughter belonged to opposite poles of society which no two people in their senses could confuse. But she administered the same subtle compensation bestowed by Agneta Stanhope, when the couple of aristocrats agreed in placing Fan quite on a level with her former Friarton patronesses.