the window at the top to
let the smoke out. Many of the Honourable Hilary's callers preferred the
little room in the far corridor to the great man's own office.

These visitors of the elder Mr. Vane's, as has been before hinted, were
not all clients. Without burdening the reader too early with a treatise
on the fabric of a system, suffice it to say that something was
continually going on that was not law; and gentlemen came and went--fat
and thin, sharp-eyed and red-faced--who were neither clients nor
lawyers. These were really secretive gentlemen, though most of them
had a hail-fellow-well-met manner and a hearty greeting, but when they
talked to the Honourable Hilary it was with doors shut, and even then
they sat very close to his ear. Many of them preferred now to wait in
Austen's office instead of the anteroom, and some of them were not so
cautious with the son of Hilary Vane that they did not let drop
certain observations to set him thinking. He had a fanciful if somewhat
facetious way of calling them by feudal titles which made them grin.

"How is the Duke of Putnam this morning?" he would ask of the
gentleman of whom the Ripton Record would frequently make the following
announcement: "Among the prominent residents of Putnam County in town
this week was the Honourable Brush Bascom."

The Honourable Brush and many of his associates, barons and earls,
albeit the shrewdest of men, did not know exactly how to take the son
of Hilary Vane. This was true also of the Honourable Hilary himself, who
did not wholly appreciate the humour in Austen's parallel of the
feudal system. Although Austen had set up for himself, there were many
ways--not legal--in which the son might have been helpful to the father,
but the Honourable Hilary hesitated, for some unformulated reason, to
make use of him; and the consequence was that Mr. Hamilton Tooting and
other young men of a hustling nature in the Honourable Hilary's office
found that Austen's advent did not tend greatly to lighten a certain
class of their labours. In fact, father and son were not much nearer in
spirit than when ode had been in Pepper County and the other in Ripton.
Caution and an instinct which senses obstacles are characteristics of
gentlemen in Mr. Vane's business.

So two years passed,--years liberally interspersed with expeditions
into the mountains and elsewhere, and nights spent in the company of
Tom Gaylord and others. During this period Austen was more tha