"I assure you, Mr. Flint, that the spirit which prompted my visit was not a contentious one. I cannot accept the pass, simply because I do not wish to be retained."

Mr. Flint eyed him. There was a mark of dignity, of silent power, on this tall scapegrace of a son of Hilary Vane that the railroad president had missed at first--probably because he had looked only for the scapegrace. Mr. Flint ardently desired to treat the matter in the trifling aspect in which he believed he saw it, to carry it off genially. But an instinct not yet formulated told the president that he was face to face with an enemy whose potential powers were not to be despised, and he bristled in spite of himself.

"There is no statute I know of by which a lawyer can be compelled to accept a retainer against his will, Mr. Vane," he replied, and overcame himself with an effort. "But I hope that you will permit me," he added in another tone, "as an old friend of your father's and as a man of some little experience in the world, to remark that intolerance is a characteristic of youth. I had it in the days of Mr. Isaac D.

Worthington, whom you do not remember. I am not addicted to flattery, but I hope and believe you have a career before you. Talk to your father. Study the question on both sides,--from the point of view of men who are honestly trying, in the face of tremendous difficulties, to protect innocent stockholders as well as to conduct a corporation in the interests of the people at large, and for their general prosperity. Be charitable, young man, and judge not hastily."

Years before, when poor Sarah Austen had adorned the end of his table, Hilary Vane had raised his head after the pronouncement of grace to surprise a look in his wife's eyes which strangely threw him into a white heat of anger. That look (and he at intervals had beheld it afterwards) was the true presentment of the soul of the woman whose body was his. It was not--as Hilary Vane thought it--a contempt for the practice of thanking one's Maker for daily bread, but a contempt for cant of one who sees the humour in cant. A masculine version of that look Mr. Flint now beheld in the eyes of Austen Vane, and the enraging effect on the president of the United Railroads was much the same as it had been on his chief counsel. Who was this young man of three and thirty to agitate him so? He trembled, though not visibly, yet took Austen's hand mechanically.

"Good day, Mr. Vane," he said; "Mr. Freeman will help you to find your horse."

The thin secretary bowed, and before he reached the door into the passage Mr. Flint had opened another at the back of the room and stepped out on a close-cropped lawn flooded with afternoon sunlight. In the passage Austen perceived a chair, and in the chair was seated patiently none other than Mr. Brush Bascom--political Duke of Putnam. Mr. Bascom's little agate eyes glittered in the dim light.

"Hello, Austen," he said, "since when have you took to comin' here?"

"It's a longer trip from Putnam than from Ripton, Brush," said Austen, and passed on, leaving Mr. Bascom with a puzzled mind. Something very like a smile passed over Mr. Freeman's face as he led the way silently out of a side entrance and around the house. The circle of the drive was empty, the tea-party had gone--and Victoria. Austen assured himself that her disappearance relieved him: having virtually quarrelled with her father, conversation would have been awkward; and yet he looked for her.

They found the buggy and Pepper in the paved courtyard of the stables.

As Austen took the reins the secretary looked up at him, his mild blue eyes burning with an unsuspected fire. He held out his hand.

"I want to congratulate you," he said.

"What for?" asked Austen, taking the hand in some embarrassment.

"For speaking like a man," said the secretary, and he turned on his heel and left him.

This strange action, capping, as it did, a stranger experience, gave Austen food for thought as he let Pepper take his own pace down the trade's road. Presently he got back into the main drive where it clung to a steep, forest-covered side hill, when his attention was distracted by the sight of a straight figure in white descending amidst the foliage ahead. His instinctive action was to pull Pepper down to a walk, scarcely analyzing his motives; then he had time, before reaching the spot where their paths would cross, to consider and characteristically to enjoy the unpropitious elements arrayed against a friendship with Victoria Flint.

She halted on a flagstone of the descending path some six feet above the roadway, and stood expectant. The Rose of Sharon, five and twenty years before, would have been coy--would have made believe to have done it by accident. But the Rose of Sharon, with all her beauty, would have had no attraction for Austen Vane. Victoria had much of her mother's good looks, the figure of a Diana, and her clothes were of a severity and correctness in keeping with her style; they merely added to the sum total of the effect upon Austen. Of course he stopped the buggy immediately beneath her, and her first question left him without any breath. No woman he had ever known seized the essentials as she did.

"What have you been doing to my father?" she asked.

"Why?" exclaimed Austen.

"Because he's in such a bad temper," said Victoria. "You must have put him in it. It can't be possible that you came all the way up here to quarrel with him. Nobody ever dares to quarrel with him."

"I didn't come up to quarrel with him," said Austen.

"What's the trouble?" asked Victoria.

The humour of this question was too much for him, and he laughed.

Victoria's eyes laughed a little, but there was a pucker in her forehead.

"Won't you tell me?" she demanded, "or must I get it out of him?"

"I am afraid," said Austen, slowly, "that you must get it out of him--if he hasn't forgotten it."

"Forgotten it, dear old soul!" cried Victoria. "I met him just now and tried to make him look at the new Guernseys, and he must have been disturbed quite a good deal when he's cross as a bear to me. He really oughtn't to be upset like that, Mr. Vane, when he comes up here to rest.

I am afraid that you are rather a terrible person, although you look so nice. Won't you tell me what you did to him?"

Austen was non-plussed.

"Nothing intentional," he answered earnestly, "but it wouldn't be fair to your father if I gave you my version of a business conversation that passed between us, would it?"

"Perhaps not," said Victoria. She sat down on the flagstone with her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, and looked at him thoughtfully. He knew well enough that a wise general would have retreated--horse, foot, and baggage; but Pepper did not stir.

"Do you know," said Victoria, "I have an idea you came up here about Zeb Meader."

"Zeb Meader!"

"Yes. I told my father about him,--how you rescued him, and how you went to see him in the hospital, and what a good man he is, and how poor."

"Oh, did you!" exclaimed Austen.

"Yes. And I told him the accident wasn't Zeb's fault, that the train didn't whistle or ring, and that the crossing was a blind one."

"And what did he say?" asked Austen, curiously.

"He said that on a railroad as big as his something of the kind must happen occasionally. And he told me if Zeb didn't make a fuss and act foolishly, he would have no cause to regret it."

"And did you tell Zeb?" asked Austen.

"Yes," Victoria admitted, "but I'm sorry I did, now."

"What did Zeb say?"

Victoria laughed in spite of herself, and gave a more or less exact though kindly imitation of Mr. Meader's manner.

"He said that wimmen-folks had better stick to the needle and the duster, and not go pokin' about law business that didn't concern 'em.

But the worst of it was," added Victoria, with some distress, "he won't accept any more fruit. Isn't he silly? He won't get it into his head that I give him the fruit, and not my father. I suspect that he actually believes my father sent me down there to tell him that."

Austen was silent, for the true significance of this apparently obscure damage case to the Northeastern Railroads was beginning to dawn on him.

The public was not in the best of humours towards railroads: there was trouble about grade crossings, and Mr. Meader's mishap and the manner of his rescue by the son of the corporation counsel had given the accident a deplorable publicity. Moreover, if it had dawned on Augustus Flint that the son of Hilary Vane might prosecute the suit, it was worth while taking a little pains with Mr. Meader and Mr. Austen Vane. Certain small fires have been known to light world-wide conflagrations.

"What are you thinking about?" asked Victoria. "It isn't at all polite to forget the person you are talking to."

"I haven't forgotten you," said Austen, with a smile. How could he--sitting under her in this manner?

"Besides," said Victoria, mollified, "you haven't an answered my question."

"Which question?"

She scrutinized him thoughtfully, and with feminine art made the kind of an attack that rarely fails.

"Why are you such an enigma, Mr. Vane?" she demanded. "Is it because you're a lawyer, or because you've been out West and seen so much of life and shot so many people?"

Austen laughed, yet he had tingling symptoms because she showed enough interest in him to pronounce him a riddle. But he instantly became serious as the purport of the last charge came home to him.

"I suppose I am looked upon as a sort of Jesse James," he said. "As it happens, I have never shot but one man, and I didn't care very much for that."