ced that a
garden-party would take place at Wedderburn, the home of the Honourable
Humphrey Crewe, at a not very distant date, and the honour of the
bearer's presence was requested. Refreshments would be served, and the
Ripton Band would dispense music. Below, in small print, were minute
directions where to enter, where to hitch your team, and where to go
out.

Austen was at a loss to know what fairy godmother had prompted Mr. Crewe
to send him an invitation, the case of the injured horse not having
advanced with noticeable rapidity. Nevertheless, the prospect of the
garden-party dawned radiantly for him above what had hitherto been a
rather gloomy horizon. Since the afternoon he had driven Victoria to
the Hammonds' he had had daily debates with an imaginary man in his own
likeness who, to the detriment of his reading of law, sat across his
table and argued with him. The imaginary man was unprincipled, and
had no dignity, but he had such influence over Austen Vane that he had
induced him to drive twice within sight of Fairview gate, when Austen
Vane had turned round again. The imaginary man was for going to call on
her and letting subsequent events take care of themselves; Austen Vane,
had an uncomfortable quality of reducing a matter first of all to
its simplest terms. He knew that Mr. Flint's views were as fixed,
ineradicable, and unchangeable as an epitaph cut in a granite monument;
he felt (as Mr. Flint had) that their first conversation had been but a
forerunner of, a strife to come between them; and add to this the facts
that Mr. Flint was very rich and Austen Vane poor, that Victoria's
friends were not his friends, and that he had grave doubts that the
interest she had evinced in him sprang from any other incentive than
a desire to have communication with various types of humanity, his
hesitation as to entering Mr. Flint's house was natural enough.

It was of a piece with Mr. Crewe's good fortune of getting what he
wanted that the day of the garden-party was the best that September
could do in that country, which is to say that it was very beautiful. A
pregnant stillness enwrapped the hills, a haze shot with gold dust, like
the filmiest of veils, softened the distant purple and the blue-black
shadows under the pines. Austen awoke from his dream in this enchanted
borderland to find himself in a long line of wagons filled with people
in their Sunday clothes,--the men in black, and the young women in
white, with g