Gregson had also a kind of grumbling respect for Mr.Horner: he did not quite like the steward's monopoly of his Harry: the mother submitted to that with a better grace, swallowing down her maternal jealousy in the prospect of her child's advancement to a better and more respectable position than that in which his parents had struggled through life.

But Mr.Horner, the steward, and Gregson, the poacher and squatter, had come into disagreeable contact too often in former days for them to be perfectly cordial at any future time.
Even now, when there was no immediate cause for anything but gratitude for his child's sake on Gregson's part, he would skulk out of Mr.
Horner's way, if he saw him coming; and it took all Mr.Horner's natural reserve and acquired self-restraint to keep him from occasionally holding up his father's life as a warning to Harry.

Now Gregson had nothing of this desire for avoidance with regard to Mr.Gray.

The poacher had a feeling of physical protection towards the parson; while the latter had shown the moral courage, without which Gregson would never have respected him, in coming right down upon him more than once in the exercise of unlawful pursuits, and simply and boldly telling him he was doing wrong, with such a quiet reliance upon Gregson's better feeling, at the same time, that the strong poacher could not have lifted a finger against Mr.
Gray, though it had been to save himself from being apprehended and taken to the lock-ups the very next hour.

He had rather listened to the parson's bold words with an approving smile, much as Mr.Gulliver might have hearkened to a lecture from a Lilliputian.