Even some of the townspeople who had only noticed and inveighed against the girl as an exceedingly vulgar, pert, giddy creature, experienced an uncomfortable conviction that her opportunities of learning to become more civilised, modest, and steady had been limited, and, such as they were, might have been a good deal counteracted by the old feuds and jealousies between classes. At the same time the blithe ring of her voice as it had floated accidentally to them, the light fall of her footstep when she had passed them, lingered in the ears of these judges, and smote them with the realisation of how young this ’Mily Polley must have been, when her detractors had not thought it beneath their superior age, rank, and refinement, to enlarge on her sins against good taste. ’Mily had her revenge in this fact, that whereas she and her set had been heartily despised, sharply ridiculed, and religiously shunned by those more gently bred ladies of Friarton, who held it as a pious duty to work for, bear with, instruct and assist the laziest and most reckless of the poor in the town, very few could now afford to scorn ’Mily. All except the smallest and grossest minds saw that the solemnity of death, even without its tragedy—as in ’Mily’s piteous case—invested the girl with a simple dignity in her grave. But it was a pity that not more men and women had possessed the larger, gentler eyes to recognise that the sacredness of life had also bestowed on her worth and importance—even while she still bounced about her mother’s shop, and flounced along the streets. Remorse, in its slightest manifestation of doubt and discontent with one’s self, is not an agreeable sensation, therefore the townspeople of Friarton, who, like the rest of the world, greatly preferred to feel at ease in their own minds, if not gently titillated with a consciousness of having done their best in the matters of justice and mercy, began to look around them in order to discover any loophole of escape from the painful impression that they had been hard and contemptuous to ’Mily Polley and perhaps hounded her on—for girls are sensitive as well as perverse—to her undoing. They were remarkably successful in their search. For one man had, as it were, redeemed the humane character of Friarton. Oliver Constable had paid respect to the girl from the first, and shown her mercy to the last. He had acted as the representative of her neighbours, and so removed, in a great measure, the lurking self-reproach from their consciences. And it was the same Oliver who had gone in for nursing old Dadd’s son, and pulled him through his fever.