One fine frosty night Harry had walked in alone, uninvited and unannounced. For Fan’s carefully-trained housemaid had become weary of announcing the perpetual visitor, and, without any rebuke from her mistress, had proceeded to treat the special duty as a work of supererogation where Mr. Harry Stanhope was concerned. Oliver had nodded and sat still in the shade at his father’s desk, turning over some papers, keeping his post mainly to preserve the liberty of pursuing his own train of reflections; while Harry Stanhope and Fan had put their heads together over the lamp on Fan’s little table in the chimney-corner, and were, according to Oliver’s conception of the situation, going over the best plans for growing corn and rearing stock, and—what was adding insult to injury in reference to Oliver’s pets, the ducks—the latest contrivances for a high development of poultry. Not satisfied with the solution of these momentous problems by lamp-light, when the pair went to the window to predict from the purple-blue sky and the glitter of the stars hung like lamps of heaven in the dark branches of the trees of Copley Grange Park, the weather to-morrow—whether skating on the mill-pond would be the order of the day, or whether the frost would give way and the scent hold, so that Harry might join the hunt ten miles off—it seemed to Oliver as if they must have started afresh to answer the whole code of agricultural questions over again, by starlight, till his patience was reduced to a shred. At last Harry took his departure somewhat abruptly in the end. Oliver stretched himself with vicious emphasis, and growled, this was insufferable, he did not think he could stand it much longer. Fan, generally so quick in retort, said nothing, but she appeared to have appropriated the observation and taken it to heart; for a moment later, when she came to bid Oliver goodnight, she suddenly put her hands upon his shoulders and looked wistfully in his face with tears in her dark eyes, and her colour wavering—as he remarked with surprise. ‘You are not angry, Oliver, dear?’ she said, with one of her rare caressing gestures and phrases, which coming as they did unlooked for, from a high-spirited almost hard little woman like Fan, were apt to sap a man’s defences, and melt his heart like wax on the spot. ‘You are not angry, Oliver?’ repeated Fan with a slight quaver in the wistful earnestness of her voice.