had learned not only to be a very capable girl of her years, but a very
secret and prudent one besides. Frank was thus conscious that he had
one ally and sympathiser in the midst of that general union of disfavour
that surrounded, watched, and waited on him in the house of Hermiston;
but he had little comfort or society from that alliance, and the demure
little maid (twelve on her last birthday) preserved her own counsel, and
tripped on his service, brisk, dumbly responsive, but inexorably
unconversational. For the others, they were beyond hope and beyond
endurance. Never had a young Apollo been cast among such rustic
barbarians. But perhaps the cause of his ill-success lay in one trait
which was habitual and unconscious with him, yet diagnostic of the man.
It was his practice to approach any one person at the expense of some
one else. He offered you an alliance against the some one else; he
flattered you by slighting him; you were drawn into a small intrigue
against him before you knew how. Wonderful are the virtues of this
process generally; but Frank's mistake was in the choice of the some one
else. He was not politic in that; he listened to the voice of
irritation. Archie had offended him at first by what he had felt to be
rather a dry reception, had offended him since by his frequent absences.
He was besides the one figure continually present in Frank's eye; and it
was to his immediate dependants that Frank could offer the snare of his
sympathy. Now the truth is that the Weirs, father and son, were
surrounded by a posse of strenuous loyalists. Of my lord they were
vastly proud. It was a distinction in itself to be one of the vassals
of the "Hanging Judge," and his gross, formidable joviality was far from
unpopular in the neighbourhood of his home. For Archie they had, one
and all, a sensitive affection and respect which recoiled from a word of
belittlement.

Nor was Frank more successful when he went farther afield. To the Four