pton knew it was there, Camden
Street knew it, and Mr. Vane's acquaintances throughout the State; but
nobody ever spoke of it. Euphrasia shed over it the only tears she
had known since Sarah Austen died, and some of these blotted the only
letters she wrote. Hilary Vane did not shed tears, but his friends
suspected that his heart-strings were torn, and pitied him. Hilary Vane
fiercely resented pity, and that was why they did not speak of it. This
trouble of his was the common point on which he and Euphrasia touched,
and they touched only to quarrel. Let us out with it--Hilary Vane had a
wild son, whose name was Austen.

Euphrasia knew that in his secret soul Mr. Vane attributed this
wildness, and what he was pleased to designate as profligacy, to the
Austen blood. And Euphrasia resented it bitterly. Sarah Austen had been
a young, elfish thing when he married her,--a dryad, the elderly and
learned Mrs. Tredway had called her. Mr Vane had understood her about
as well as he would have understood Mary, Queen of Scots, if he had been
married to that lady. Sarah Austen had a wild, shy beauty, startled,
alert eyes like an animal, and rebellious black hair that curled about
her ears and gave her a faun-like appearance. With a pipe and the
costume of Rosalind she would have been perfect. She had had a habit of
running off for the day into the hills with her son, and the conventions
of Ripton had been to her as so many defunct blue laws. During her brief
married life there had been periods of defiance from her lasting a week,
when she would not speak to Hilary or look at him, and these periods
would be followed by violent spells of weeping in Euphrasia's arms,
when the house was no place for Hilary. He possessed by matrimony and
intricate mechanism of which his really admirable brain could not grasp
the first principles; he felt for her a real if uncomfortable
affection, but when she died he heaved a sigh of relief, at which he was
immediately horrified.

Austen he understood little better, but his affection for the child may
be likened to the force of a great river rushing through a narrow gorge,
and he vied with Euphrasia in spoiling him. Neither knew what they were
doing, and the spoiling process was interspersed with occasional and
(to Austen) unmeaning intervals of severe discipline. The boy loved
the streets and the woods and his fellow-beings; his punishments were
a series of afternoons in the house, during one of which he