Janet met me next day, saying with some insolence (so it struck me from her liveliness):  ’Well, it’s all right, Harry?  Now you’ll be happy, I hope.  I did not shine in my reply.  Her amiable part appeared to be to let me see how brilliant and gracious the commonplace could be made to look.  She kept Heriot at the Grange, against the squire’s remonstrance and her mother’s.  ’It ’s to keep him out of harm’s way:  the women he knows are not of the best kind for him,’ she said, with astounding fatuity.  He submitted, and seemed to like it.  She must be teaching Temple to skate figures in the frost, with a great display of good-humoured patience, and her voice at musical pitches.  But her principal affectation was to talk on matters of business with Mr. Burgin and Mr. Trewint, the squire’s lawyer and bailiff, on mines and interest, on money and economical questions; not shrinking from politics either, until the squire cries out to the males assisting in the performance, ’Gad, she ’s a head as good as our half-dozen put together,’ and they servilely joined their fragmentary capitals in agreement.  She went so far as to retain Peterborough to teach her Latin.  He was idling in the expectation of a living in the squire’s gift.

The annoyance for me was that I could not detach myself from a contemplation of these various scenes, by reverting to my life in Germany.  The preposterous closing of my interview with Ottilia blocked the way, and I was unable to write to her—­unable to address her even in imagination, without pangs of shame at the review of the petty conspiracy I had sanctioned to entrap her to plight her hand to me, and without perpetually multiplying excuses for my conduct.  So to escape them I was reduced to study Janet, forming one of her satellites.  She could say to me impudently, with all the air of a friendly comrade, ’Had your letter from Germany yet, Harry?’ She flew—­she was always on the chase.  I saw her permit Heriot to kiss her hand, and then the squire appeared, and Heriot and she burst into laughter, and the squire, with a puzzled face, would have the game explained to him, but understood not a bit of it, only growled at me; upon which Janet became serious and chid him.  I was told by my aunt Dorothy to admire this behaviour of hers.  One day she certainly did me a service:  a paragraph in one of the newspapers spoke of my father, not flatteringly:  ‘Richmond is in the field again,’ it commenced.  The squire was waiting for her to hand the paper to him.  None of us could comprehend why she played him off and denied him his right to the first perusal of the news; she was voluble, almost witty, full of sprightly Roxalana petulance.